Performance and Complexity Analysis of Credit-Based End-to-End Flow Control in Network-on-Chip

摘要

Network-on-Chip is an alternative paradigm to improve communication bandwidth compared to bus-based communication, and its performance degrades if there is no effective flow control method., Heterogeneous networks with very slow processing elements (Pes) especially need a flow control mechanism at the transport layer to prevent too much packet injection. In this paper, a credit-based end-to-end flow control (CB-EEFC) is implemented to control the network latency at high traffic loads. Simulation in mesh networks shows improved performance in latency and 0.5% up to 3% saturated throughput decrease with the CB-EEFC method. RTL gate level simulation shows that a network interface using CB-EEFC brings about a 31.4% increase in complexity compared to a network interface without CB-EEFC.