EDF as an Arbitration Policy for Wormhole-Switched Priority-Preemptive NoCs - Myth or Fact?

A constant increase in the number of processors integrated within multiprocessor platforms led to more apparent contentions for the interconnect medium. Consequently, inter-processor communication latencies significantly outgrew the threshold until which their effects on the real-time analysis of multiprocessors can be discarded as negligible. Yet, despite its ever increasing importance, the contention analysis of interconnects is still in its infancy! In that vein, we propose a novel arbitration policy for interconnect routers, which is based on the EDF paradigm - a well-established approach in the scheduling theory. First, we elaborate on the practical aspects of this model and propose the worstcase traffic delay analysis. Then, we experimentally evaluate the approach against the state-of-the-art methods, and also investigate its practical limitations, so as to give a complete answer to the question posed in the title of this work.