HTPA: a hybrid traffic pattern aware arbitration strategy for network on chip systems

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a communication infrastructure designed to integrate various components of a System-on-Chip (SoC) and connect multi-core processors. In on-chip networks, routing is a process that determines how a data packet should move from the source node to the destination node. Essentially, a routing algorithm configures the internal connections of a switch to establish communication towards the destination node by examining the source, destination and the current node addresses. After routing, multiple input channels may simultaneously request access to an output channel based on the routing results. In such cases, an arbitration strategy needs to prioritize access to the output channel for the requesting input channels. This research presents an arbitration strategy called HTPA (Hybrid Traffic Pattern Aware arbitration) that utilizes local and global information. HTPA also uses a hybrid arbitration scheme consisting of a simple arbitration and a complex switch arbitration. Additionally, it uses age-related techniques to increase the fairness of arbitration and prevent starvation. The proposed method considers certain priorities for accessing output channels based on the distance to the destination, the number of available paths from the current node to the destination, and the traffic intensity parameter. Evaluations were conducted under uniform, transient, hot spot, and MPEG traffic patterns and the proposed method demonstrated a reduction in average packet delay compared to Round Robin, CAIS, and DTIS methods by ۹.۷%, ۱.۰%, and ۱۹.۹۱%, respectively, across various traffic patterns.

کلیدواژه ها:

Network-on-chip ، Arbitration ، Traffic pattern aware ، Age-related techniques ، Traffic intensity