Flow control and scheduling mechanism to improve network performance in wireless NoC

Abstract

Today's, a promising solution, namely wireless network-on-chip (WiNoC) is utilized in multi-core systems to overcome the constraints of conventional on-chip networks. In WiNoC architectures, wireless routers (WRs) provide high capacity wireless links to reduce the latency of multi-hop communications. However, the buffer size of the WR antenna is limited, and under heavy traffic loads, it's filled and congestion occurs. On the other hand, network performance is degraded severely in the presence of head-of-line (HOL) blocking. Therefore, flow control and scheduling mechanisms are vital for improving the performance of WiNoCs. In this study, a flow control scheme based on an active queue management algorithm, and a priority-based scheduling strategy are suggested. The proposed mechanisms are evaluated under uniform and Bit-complement traffic patterns with different packet injection rate. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes have a significant impact on performance parameters, such as latency and throughput. Moreover, the saturation packet injection rate in WiNoC with four WRs is improved to about 33% under uniform traffic and is increased up to about 50% under the Bit-complement traffic pattern. This is increased by 16 and 50% in WiNoC with 16 WRs for uniform and Bit-complement traffic patterns, respectively, compared to the conventional WiNoCs.