Congestion aware adaptive routing for network-on-chip communication

Abstract

Network-On-Chip (NoC) has surpassed the traditional bus based on-chip communication in offering better performance for data transfers among many processing, peripheral and other cores of high performance embedded systems. Adaptive routing provides an effective way of efficient on-chip communication among NoC cores. The message routing efficiency can further improve the performance of NoC based embedded systems on a chip. Congestion awareness has been applied to adaptive routing for achieving better data throughput and latency. This thesis presents a novel approach of analyzing congestion to improve NoC throughput by improving packet allocation in NoC routers. The routers would have the knowledge of the traffic conditions around themselves by utilizing the congestion information. We employ header flits to store the congestion information that does not require any additional communication links between the routers. By prioritizing data packets that are likely to suffer the worst congestion would improve overall NoC data transfer latency.