PARS - An Efficient Congestion-Aware Routing Method for Networks-on-Chip

The performance of NoCs (Networks-On-Chip) highly relies on the routing algorithm. Despite the higher implementation complexity compared with deterministic routing, adaptive routing has several merits, such as lower latency, higher throughput and better fault-tolerance performance. Most of the existing adaptive routing algorithms are based on the comparison of the horizontal and vertical congestion status in the network. However the performance of adaptive routing schemes suffers from the inadequate global congestion information. To address this issue, we proposed a novel routing algorithm with a congestion aware subnetwork to obtain more accurate non-local congestion information. This subnetwork will propagate the congestion information along the paths directly towards the destination. To find a less congested path, PARS (Path-Aware Routing Scheme) uses the congestion information of paths in a straight direction towards the destination rather than local congestion information. The simulation results reveal that the new presented scheme can offer better performance under different traffic profiles with a small hardware overhead.