High Performance Dynamic Resource Allocation for Guaranteed Service in Network-on-Chips

Abstract

This paper proposes a dedicated connection allocation unit—the NoCManager—implementing the connection allocation functionality in circuit-switched network-on-chip (NoC) based on time-division-multiplexing (TDM). The NoCManager employs a novel trellis-search-algorithm (TESSA) that solves the allocation optimization problem by making use of dynamic programming approach. This enables to explore all possible paths between source-destination node pairs in order to determine the shortest available path. Three different trellis structures are proposed and analyzed for the purpose of different application scenarios. In contrast to previous TDM allocation approaches, the proposed method offers the following advantages: (1) hardware supported fast and high-throughput allocation mechanism; (2) improved success rate due to parallel multi-slot multi-path search mechanism; (3) selection of the contention-free shortest path with a guaranteed low latency; (4) general mathematical formulation allowing a variety of optimization ideas. The proposed method is compared to the state of the art centralized and distributed techniques under uniformly distributed random traffic as well as real-application traffic. The experimental results demonstrate two orders of magnitude improvement in allocation speed and tens of times higher success rate against the centralized software solutions, and 5 to 10 percent higher success rate against the centralized hardware solution. Moreover, it achieves up to 8x higher allocation speed and up to 29 percent higher success rate against recently proposed distributed solution.