Fault-tolerant design for data efficient retransmission in WiNoC

Abstract

There is a sharp decline in the network performance when the wireless link fails as a data path in the Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC). To counteract this problem, we propose a fault-tolerance mechanism for the efficient retransmission of data in the WiNoC. When an error is detected in the data transmission process, this mechanism works to feed back the fault information to the source node in real time via fault signal lines. In the source node, the highest transmission priority is assigned to the backup retransmitted data, and the corresponding direct link is positioned to enable the data packet for its efficient retransmission to the destination node, thereby ensuring efficiency in fault tolerance. Additionally, we have improved the receiving port of the wireless router, added the corresponding redundant buffers and mux, and dynamically selected the retransmitted non-faulty data packets to be written to the local router in order to avoid the disorderly retransmission of the data packets. The evaluation results of this paper demonstrate that compared with the methods which are under different fault conditions, this fault-tolerant method drastically improves the data throughput rate, reduces the delay, effectively guarantees the reliability of the network, and improves the system performance.