An adaptive congestion-aware routing algorithm based on network load for wireless routers in wireless network-on-chip

Abstract

Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) is regarded as one of the promising alternative approaches for sorting out the issues of latency and power consumption in the conventional Network-on-Chip (NoC). Despite the additional bandwidth of wireless channels on a chip, wireless routers (WRs) are prone to congestion in WiNoC due to the limited number of wireless channels on a chip and the shared use of these channels among all the cores. In this paper, an adaptive congestion-aware routing algorithm consistent with traffic load is proposed for solving the congestion problem of WRs. The proposed algorithm selects source-destination pairs with the longest wired hop distance for using wireless channels. The number of selected packets is determined based on the wireless channel bandwidth and the network traffic load. Simulation results show up to 65% latency improvement, 16% wired/wireless link utilization improvement and a saturation throughput increase of approximately 11%.