A real-time hardware-software codesign technique of network protocols to provide QoS

摘要

We present the inter-task communication technique incorporating the RHSCC (Real-time Hardware-Software Communcation Channel) that makes it possible to resolve the hardware-software co-design issue of implementing network protocols in the NoC (Network on Chip) architecture developed in this paper. We address this issue as a partition problem of implementing any network protocol suite into real-time application-specific and reconfigurable hardware and software tasks. Such a task decomposition technique can improve co-design productivity by supporting the modularity and reuse of complex network protocol cores. The RHSCC guarantees the real-time performance of periodic packets and minimize the average response time of aperiodic packets in order to provide the QoS support. A case study based on experiments is conducted to illustrate the application and efficiency of the proposed technique by implementing it in the NoC architecture derived from the Altera's Excalibur EPXA4 which is a commercial SoC (System on Chip) platform.