Runtime buffer management to improve the performance in irregular Network-on-Chip architecture

This paper presents a heterogeneous adaptable router to reduce latency in irregular mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures. Regular mesh-based NoC architecture may become irregular due to variable sized IPs and needs new routing algorithms to ensure throughput. Therefore, an irregular NoC mesh is considered and an adaptive algorithm is used for routing. The performance measures such as throughput, latency, and bandwidth are defined at design time to guarantee the performance of NoC. However, if the application has to change its communication pattern, parameters set at design time (say buffer size) may result in large area and power consumption or increased latency. Routers with large input buffers improve the efficiency of NoC communication, but they incur excessive power dissipation and hardware overheads. Routers with small buffers reduce power consumption, but result in high latency. In the proposed NoC router, input buffers can be dynamically allocated, thereby, latency can be reduced. In a 4 x 4 irregular mesh NoC with a buffer depth of 4 slots, 20% reduction in latency and 9% increase in throughput are attained using dynamic buffer allocation. An 8 x 8 irregular mesh NoC with the proposed router is exposed to the synthetic traffics like uniform, bit complement, tornado and hotspot traffics and it offered a 30.42% reduction in overall average latency and 18.33% increase in overall saturation throughput. The proposed router outperformed the static router by 22.63% less average latency for E3S benchmark applications. For the same performance, maximum of 55% reduction in buffer requirement and 53% less power consumption is achieved.