Wireless network on-chips history-based traffic prediction for token flow control and allocation

Wireless network-on-chip (WiNoC) uses a wireless backbone on top of the traditional wired-based NoC which demonstrated high scalability. WiNoC introduces long-range single-hop link connecting distanced core and high bandwidth radio frequency interconnects that reduces multi-hop communication in conventional wired-based NoC. However, to ensure full benefits of WiNoC technology, there is a need for fair and efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism to enhance communication in the wireless Network-on-Chip. To adapt to the varying traffic demands from the applications running on a multicore environment, MAC mechanisms should dynamically adjust the transmission slots of the wireless interfaces (WIs), to ensure efficient utilization of the wireless medium in a WiNoC. This work presents a prediction model that improves MAC mechanism to predict the traffic demand of the WIs and respond accordingly by adjusting transmission slots of the WIs. This research aims to reduce token waiting time and inefficient decision making for radio hub-to-hub communication and congestion-aware routing in WiNoC to enhance end to end latency. Through system level simulation, we will show that the dynamic MAC using an History-based prediction mechanism can significantly improve the performance of a WiNoC in terms of latency and network throughput compared to the state-of-the-art dynamic MAC mechanisms

Performance realization of Bridge Model using Ethernet-MAC for NoC based system with FPGA Prototyping

The System on Chip (SoC) integrates the number of processing elements (PE) with different application requirements on a single chip. The SoC uses bus-based interconnection with shared memory access. However, buses are not scalable and limited to particular interface protocol. To overcome these problems, The Network on Chip (NoC) is an emerging interconnect solution with a scalable and reliable solution over SoC. The bridge model is essential to communicate the NoC based system on SoC. In this article, a cost-effective and efficient bridge model with ethernet-MAC is designed and also the placement of the bride with NoC based system is prototyped on Artix-7 FPGA. The Bridge model mainly contains FIFO modules, Serializer and de-serializer, priority-based arbiter with credit counter, packet framer and packet parser with Ethernet-MAC transceiver Module. The bridge with a single router and different sizes of the NoC based systems with mesh topology are designed using adaptive-XY routing. The performance metrics are evaluated for bridge with NoC in terms of average latency and maximum throughput for different Packet Injection Rate (PIR)

Weighted Round Robin Configuration for Worst-Case Delay Optimization in Network-on-Chip

We propose an approach for computing the end-to-end delay bound of individual variable bit-rate flows in a FIFO multiplexer with aggregate scheduling under Weighted Round Robin (WRR) policy. To this end, we use network calculus to derive per-flow end-to-end equivalent service curves employed for computing Least Upper Delay Bounds (LUDBs) of individual flows. Since real time applications are going to meet guaranteed services with lower delay bounds, we optimize weights in WRR policy to minimize LUDBs while satisfying performance constraints. We formulate two constrained delay optimization problems, namely, Minimize-Delay and Multiobjective optimization. Multi-objective optimization has both total delay bounds and their variance as minimization objectives. The proposed optimizations are solved using a genetic algorithm. A Video Object Plane Decoder (VOPD) case study exhibits 15.4% reduction of total worst-case delays and 40.3% reduction on the variance of delays when compared with round robin policy. The optimization algorithm has low run-time complexity, enabling quick exploration of large design spaces. We conclude that an appropriate weight allocation can be a valuable instrument for delay optimization in on-chip network designs

Low Latency Network-on-Chip Router Microarchitecture Using Request Masking Technique

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is fast emerging as an on-chip communication alternative for many-core System-on-Chips (SoCs). However, designing a high performance low latency NoC with low area overhead has remained a challenge. In this paper, we present a two-clock-cycle latency NoC microarchitecture. An efficient request masking technique is proposed to combine virtual channel (VC) allocation with switch allocation nonspeculatively. Our proposed NoC architecture is optimized in terms of area overhead, operating frequency, and quality-of-service (QoS). We evaluate our NoC against CONNECT, an open source low latency NoC design targeted for field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The experimental results on several FPGA devices show that our NoC router outperforms CONNECT with 50% reduction of logic cells (LCs) utilization, while it works with 100% and 35%~20% higher operating frequency compared to the one- and two-clock-cycle latency CONNECT NoC routers, respectively. Moreover, the proposed NoC router achieves 2.3 times better performance compared to CONNECT

Low latency Network-on-Chip router microarchitecture using request masking technique

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is fast emerging as an on-chip communication alternative for many-core System-on-Chips (SoCs). However, designing a high performance low latency NoC with low area overhead has remained a challenge. In this paper, we present a two-clock-cycle latency NoC microarchitecture. An efficient request masking technique is proposed to combine virtual channel (VC) allocation with switch allocation nonspeculatively. Our proposed NoC architecture is optimized in terms of area overhead, operating frequency, and quality-of-service (QoS). We evaluate our NoC against CONNECT, an open source low latency NoC design targeted for field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The experimental results on several FPGA devices show that our NoC router outperforms CONNECT with 50% reduction of logic cells (LCs) utilization, while it works with 100% and 35%~20% higher operating frequency compared to the one- and two-clock-cycle latency CONNECT NoC routers, respectively. Moreover, the proposed NoC router achieves 2.3 times better performance compared to CONNECT