Communication Latency Evaluation on a Software-Defined Network-on-Chip

摘要

In conventional NoCs, it is common to implement the routing strategy inside the circuitry of the router. However, the problem with having only one possible route between source and destination is the lack of alternative paths in case of congestions. A more recent approach to cope with this problem consists in implementing the routing strategy in software in a dedicated core, the Software-Defined Networks-on-Chip (SDNoCs). The strategy relies on managing virtual circuits on demand. In the present work, we evaluate the communication latency of SDNoCs over deterministic and adaptive routing algorithms, varying network traffic. We implement routing algorithms based on graphs theory. The experimental results point that the adaptive algorithm is a better choice for low traffic scenarios, achieving up to 3.6× of speedup when compared with the deterministic approach. However, for intense traffics, both routing algorithms approaches produce similar results.