A Study of Effect of Traffic Patterns on NoC Routing Algorithms

Abstract

Network-on-Chip,nowadays are very much advantageous over primitive on-chip wired or other types of communication methodologies by enhancing the performance of a system.The main performance and power block for a system is the communication of SoCs with thousands of IP cores within the on-chip architecture.This led to the ever increasing demand of Network-on-Chip which is by far the most reliable solution for SoCs in future.This paper presents and extensive research and analysis of performance of various traffic patterns for standard algorithms and process-variation aware algorithms as well.We have used NoCTweak, which is a cycle-accurate simulator using SystemC to evaluate the performance of various metrics like latency, saturation throughput,saturation power, saturation energy.A case study is shown in the work showing that the process variation aware XY routing algorithm gives better performance in terms of all the performance metrics.An comprehensive research on Flow Control techniques like Worm-hole and Virtual Cut-through flow channel has also been done in this work Both the worm-hole and virtual channel flow control mechanism are flit based mechanisms.The use of virtual cut-through flow control algorithms in NoCs also gives us an improved performance than that of wormhole pipeline on on-chip networks.This is mainly due to the elimination of Head-of-line blocking in case of Virtual Channel flow control algorithms.Virtual cut-through flow control mechanism shows significantly better results in each of the traffic patterns.