Runtime Contention and Bandwidth-Aware Adaptive Routing Selection Strategies for Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

This paper presents adaptive routing selection strategies suitable for network-on-chip (NoC). The main prototype presented in this paper uses contention information and bandwidth space occupancy to make routing decision at runtime during application execution time. The performance of the NoC router is compared to other NoC routers with queue-length-oriented adaptive routing selection strategies. The evaluation results show that the contention- and bandwidth-aware adaptive routing selection strategies are better than the queue-length-oriented adaptive selection strategies. Messages in the NoC are switched with a wormhole cut-through switching method, where different messages can be interleaved at flit-level in the same communication link without using virtual channels. Hence, the head-of-line blocking problem can be solved effectively and efficiently. The routing control concept and the VLSI microarchitecture of the NoC routers are also presented in this paper.