Using segmentation to improve schedulability of RRA-based NoCs with mixed traffic

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the interconnect of choice for many-core processors and system-on-chips in general. Most of the existing NoC designs focus on the performance with respect to average throughput, which makes them less applicable for real-time applications especially when applications have hard timing requirements on the worst-case scenarios. In this paper, we focus on a Round-Robin Arbitration (RRA) based wormhole-switched NoC which is a common architecture used in most of the existing implementations. We propose a novel segmentation algorithm targeting RRA-based NoCs in order to improve the schedulability of real-time traffic without modifying the hardware architecture. Additionally, we also address the problem of transmitting both real-time traffic and best-effort traffic in the same NoC. The proposed solutions aim to provide timing guarantees to real-time traffic and achieve low latency for best-effort traffic. According to the evaluation results, the proposed segmentation solution can significantly improve the schedulability of the whole network.

I. Introduction

The complexity of todays embedded applications is steadily increasing. Many industrial domains face the shift away from single-core platforms towards multi-and many-core platforms in order to fulfill the applications growing demand for computational power, while still satisfying the requirements on low power consumption.