Agent-based on-chip network using efficient selection method

Abstract

Congestion in on-chip networks may cause many drawbacks in multiprocessor systems including throughput reduction, increase in latency, and additional power consumption. Furthermore, conventional congestion control methods, employed for on-chip networks, cannot efficiently collect congestion information and distribute them over the on-chip network. In this paper, we present a novel structure for on-chip networks, named Agent-based Network-on-Chip (ANoC), to diagnose the congested areas. In addition to the presented structure, an efficient Congestion-Aware Selection (CAS) method is proposed to reduce overall network latency. CAS is capable of selecting an appropriate output channel to route packets along a less congested path. 29% average and 35% maximum latency reduction are achieved on SPLASH-2 and PARSEC benchmarks running on a 36-core Chip Multi-Processor.