Improving the performance of deadlock recovery based routing in irregular mesh NoCs using added mesh-like links

Abstract

Heterogeneity is one of the challenges in the current NoC design which forces designers to consider irregular topologies. Therefore, finding an optimal topology with minimum cost (minimum use of links, buffers, NIs, etc) and power consumption, and maximum flexibility can provide the best cost-performance trade-off. Irregular mesh is a topology which combines the benefits of regularity and advantage of irregularity. Routing algorithms especially those coupled with wormhole switching should deal with deadlock occurrences. Unlike deadlock avoidance-based schemes, deadlock detection and recovery-based routing schemes, do not restrict routing adaptability. In this paper, we modify irregular mesh architecture and add some extra mesh-like links to improve its performance using deadlock recovery routing. We evaluate the performance under three well-known deadlock recovery routing algorithms and different traffic patterns before and after the link insertion. Simulation results show the proposed method can noticeably reduce the number of detected deadlocks, average packet latency, routing table size at each node, and energy consumption.