Scheduling Real-Time Packets with Non-Preemptive Regions on Priority-based NoCs

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a preferred communication medium for massively parallel platforms. Fixed-priority based scheduling using virtual-channels is one of the promising solutions to support real-time traffic in on-chip networks. Most of the existing NoC implementations which can support fixed-priority based scheduling use a flit-level preemptive scheduling. Under such a mechanism, preemptions can happen between the transmissions of successive flits. In this paper, we present a modified framework where the non-preemptive region of each NoC packet increases from a single flit. Using the proposed approach, the response times of certain packet flows can be reduced, which can thus improve the schedulability of the whole network. As a result, the utilization of NoCs can be improved by admitting more real-time traffic. Schedulability tests regarding the proposed framework are presented along with the proof of the correctness. Moreover, a number of experiments as well as a case study based on an automotive application have been generated, where we can clearly observe the improvement of our solution compared to the original flit-level preemptive NoC.