Computing Accurate Performance Bounds for Best Effort Networks-on-Chip

Real-time (RT) communication support is a critical requirement for many complex embedded applications which are currently targeted to Network-on-chip (NoC) platforms. In this paper, we present novel methods to efficiently calculate worst- case bandwidth and latency bounds for RT traffic streams on wormhole-switched NoCs with arbitrary topology. The proposed methods apply to best-effort NoC architectures, with no extra hardware dedicated to RT traffic support. By applying our methods to several realistic NoC designs, we show substantial improvements (more than 30% in bandwidth and 50% in latency, on average) in bound tightness with respect to existing approaches

Hard Real-Time Communication in Bus-Based Networks ∗

Route selection is an important aspect of the design of realtime systems in which messages might have to travel over multiple hops to reach their destination and multiple paths exist between a source and a destination. The length of a route affects the ability to meet deadlines and greedy routing might leave certain messages with no feasible route. We consider bus-based networks on which periodic message transmissions need to be scheduled and present a technique for synthesizing routes such that all messages meet their deadlines. Our offline technique enables system designers to configure routes in a large-scale embedded system. In our solution, we allow message fragmentation and utilize multiple paths to satisfy the requirements of each message. The routing problem is NP-complete and our approximation algorithm is based on a linear programming formulation. In our methodology, we deal with both earliest deadline first and rate monotonic scheduling at each bus in the system. Apart from point-to-point messages, we discuss scheduling multicast messages to facilitate the publisher/subscriber model. Finally, we also mention some heuristics for online routing which might be of value in soft real-time systems. 1