A case study for NoC based homogeneous MPSoC architectures

The many-core design paradigm requires flexible and modular hardware and software components to provide the required scalability to next-generation on-chip multiprocessor architectures. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary to consider all the interactions between the different components of the design. In this paper, a complete design methodology that tackles at once the aspects of system level modeling, hardware architecture, and programming model has been successfully used for the implementation of a multiprocessor network-on-chip (NoC)-based system, the NoCRay graphic accelerator. The design, based on 16 processors, after prototyping with field-programmable gate array (FPGA), has been laid out in 90-nm technology. Post-layout results show very low power, area, as well as 500 MHz of clock frequency. Results show that an array of small and simple processors outperform a single high-end general purpose processo

REDO RSVP: Efficient Signalling for Multimedia in the Internet

Alarming reports of performance and scalability problems associated with per-flow reservations, have led many to lose belief in RSVP and the Integrated Services Architecture that relies on it. Because we are convinced of the need for some form of resource reservation, to support multimedia communications in the Internet, we have set about trying to improve RSVP. By careful study of the protocol, we have identified areas for improvement, and propose REDO RSVP, a reduced overhead version that includes a fast establishment mechanism (FEM). In this paper we describe the rationale for REDO RSVP and present a detailed analysis of its features and operations. We also analyse REDO RSVP by means of simulations, and show that it offers improvements to the performance of RSVP

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

On the design of an energy-efficient low-latency integrated protocol for distributed mobile sensor networks

Self organizing, wireless sensors networks are an emergent and challenging technology that is attracting large attention in the sensing and monitoring community. Impressive progress has been done in recent years even if we need to assume that an optimal protocol for every kind of sensor network applications can not exist. As a result it is necessary to optimize the protocol for certain scenarios. In many applications for instance latency is a crucial factor in addition to energy consumption. MERLIN performs its best in such WSNs where there is the need to reduce the latency while ensuring that energy consumption is kept to a minimum. By means of that, the low latency characteristic of MERLIN can be used as a trade off to extend node lifetimes. The performance in terms of energy consumption and latency is optimized by acting on the slot length. MERLIN is designed specifically to integrate routing, MAC and localization protocols together. Furthermore it can support data queries which is a typical application for WSNs. The MERLIN protocol eliminates the necessity to have any explicit handshake mechanism among nodes. Furthermore, the reliability is improved using multiple path message propagation in combination with an overhearing mechanism. The protocol divides the network into subsets where nodes are grouped in time zones. As a result MERLIN also shows a good scalability by utilizing an appropriate scheduling mechanism in combination with a contention period