Task-Binding Based Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for NoC Mapping

Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture is drawing intensive attention since it promises to maintain high performance in handling complex communication issues as the number of on-chip components increases. Mapping a given application onto the multi-core processors on NoC to obtain a high performance is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose an optimized branch-and-bound (B&B) mapping algorithm to reduce the communication energy or improve the mapping efficiency by binding the tasks together when they have a large communication volume. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve high performance in a short time compared with the traditional algorithm. For example, when mapping 64 tasks onto an 8x8 NoC system, with the approximate run time, 14.72% and 64.11% average energy consumption is saved compared with the original B&B and simulated annealing (SA) algorithms, respectively.