Title
Application-aware virtual paths insertion for NOCs.
Abstract
Network-on-chip (NoC) has rapidly become a promising alternative for complex system-on-chip architectures including recent multicore architectures. Additionally, optimizing NoC architectures with respect to different design objectives that are suitable for a particular application domain is crucial for achieving high-performance and energy-efficient customized solutions. Despite the fact that many researches have provided various solutions for different aspects of NoCs design, a comprehensive NoCs system solution has not emerged yet. This paper presents a novel methodology to provide a solution for complex on-chip communication problems to reduce power, latency and area overhead. Our proposed NoC communication architecture is based on setting up virtual source–destination paths between selected pairs of NoCs cores so that the packets belonging to distance nodes in the network can bypass intermediate routers while traveling through these virtual paths. In this scheme, the paths are constructed for an application based on its task-graph at the design time. After that, the run time scheduling mechanism is applied to improve the buffer management, virtual channel and switch allocation schemes and hence, the constructed paths are optimized dynamically. Moreover, in our design the router complexity and its overheads are reduced. Additionally, the suggested router has been implemented on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA family. The evaluation results captured by SPLASH-2 benchmark suite reveal that in comparison with the conventional NoC router, the proposed router takes 25% and 53% reduction in latency and energy, respectively besides 3.5% area overhead. Indeed, our experimental results demonstrate a significant reduction in the average packet latency and total power consumption with negligible area overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.mejo.2014.02.010
Microelectronics Journal
Keywords
Field
DocType
Network architecture,Multiprocessor System-on-Chip,Network-on-Chip,On-chip communication
Scheduling (computing),Network packet,Network architecture,Network on a chip,Application domain,Router,Engineering,Multi-core processor,Virtual channel,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
45
4
0026-2692
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
23
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Majed ValadBeigi192.19
Farshad Safaei29519.37
Bahareh Pourshirazi3103.16