Analysis of Monitoring Structures for Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Monitoring services are essential for advanced, reliable NoC systems. They should support traffic management, system reconfiguration and fault detection to enable optimal performance and reliability of the system. The paper presents a thorough description of NoC monitoring structures and studies earlier works. A distributed monitoring structure is proposed and compared against the structures presented in previous works. The proposed distributed network monitoring system does not require centralized control, is fully scalable and does not cause significant traffic overhead to the network. The distributed structure is in line with the scalability and flexibility of the NoC paradigm. The paper studies the monitoring structure features and analyzes traffic overhead, monitoring data diffusion, cost and performance. The advantages of distributed monitoring are found evident and the limitations of the structure are discussed.