SRNoC: A novel high performance Shared-Resource routing scheme for Network-on-Chip

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel Shared-Resource routing scheme, SRNoC, that not only enhances network transmission performance, but also provides a high efficient load-balance solution for NoC design. The proposed SRNoC scheme expands the NoC design space and provides a novel effective NoC framework. SRNoC scheme mainly consists of the topology and routing algorithm. The proposed topology of SRNoC is based on the Shared-Resource mechanism, in which the routers are divided into groups and each group of routers share a set of specified link resource. Because of the usage of Shared Resource mechanism, SRNoC could effectively distribute the workload uniformly onto the network so as to improve the utilization of the resource and alleviate the network congestion. The proposed routing algorithm is a minimal oblivious routing algorithm. It could improve average latency and saturation load owing to its flexibility and high efficiency. In order to evaluate the load-balance property of the network, we proposed a method to calculate the Φ which represents the characteristic value of load-balance. The smaller the Φ, the better the performance in load-balance. Simulation results show that the average latency and saturation load are dramatically improved by SRNoC both in synthetic traffic patterns and real application traffic trace with negligible hardware overhead. Under the same simulation condition, SRNoC could cut down the total network workload to 48.67% at least. Moreover, SRNoC reduces the value of Φ 45% at least compared with other routing algorithms, which means it achieves better load-balance feature.