Flexible and Efficient QoS Provisioning in AXI4-Based Network-on-Chip Architecture

Abstract

We propose a Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based whole system design, whose communication architecture is compatible with the AMBA AXI4 protocol and supports high-performance multiple Quality-of-Service (QoS) schemes. In our system, the network interface (NI) between the NoC and the master/slave node is proposed to make the NoC architecture independent from the AXI4 protocol via message format conversion between the AXI4 signal format and the packet format, offering high flexibility to the NoC design. Besides, a QoS inheritance mechanism is applied in the slave-side NI to support QoS during packets' round-trip transfer in the NoC. The NoC system contains Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Virtual Channel (VC) subnetworks to apply multiple QoS schemes to AXI4 signals with different QoS tags and the NI is responsible for signals distribution between two subnetworks. Besides, a traffic converter is proposed in each NI to balance the traffic between the two subnetworks when necessary. The experimental results show that our proposed architecture ensures a high-throughput and lowlatency NoC system. By applying traffic converter, the packet latency can be improved.

Anticipative QoS Control: A Self-Reconfigurable On-Chip Communication

“…For example, there are tens, or hundreds of cores in an SoC chip, and the interconnection distance and electric resistance can require multiple clock cycles for a communication pair between two cores in the SoC chip. To meet the need for new generation system designs, Network-on-Chip (NoC) [ 3 , 4 ] was proposed and had continued to be the focus of all people who work to enhance the performance of on-chip communications [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ].…”

“…Rahmati et al [ 13 ] realized a simple prioritized arbitration to differentiate high and low-priority traffic flows, consequently there was substantial performance improvement for high-priority flows. Wang et al [ 9 ] designed a QoS provisioning NoC architecture, which is an inheritance mechanism to convert QoS information into the request buffers of the NoC.…”