Design and performance evaluation of Mesh-of-Tree-based hierarchical wireless network-on-chip for multicore systems

Abstract

Hybrid Wireless Network on Chip (WNoC) architecture has been proposed as a promising solution for addressing on-chip communication problems in many multicore systems. The choice of infrastructure topology directly affects the performance gain of the architecture. For exploiting the benefits offered by both mesh and tree topologies, we employ Mesh-of-Tree (MoT) topology as a new communication infrastructure for hybrid WNoC architectures. Moreover, long-distance links are effectively added to the MoT topology to form wireless MoT architecture and an appropriate communication routing scheme is presented to employ this paradigm. The performance and the system cost of the proposed WNoC architecture have been evaluated and compared with other notable WNoC architectures through comprehensive network-level simulations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this wireless MoT architecture under both synthetic and realistic traffic patterns in terms of network throughput, latency, and power consumption. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture can approximately achieve 35% improvement in saturation throughput, 58% reduction in transmission latency, and 43% improvement in power consumption over a wireline MoT-NoC, on average.