Flit admission in on-chip wormhole-switched networks with virtual channels

Flit-admission solutions for wormhole switches must minimize the complexity of the switches in order to achieve cheap implementations. We propose to couple flit-admission buffers with physical channels so that flits from a flit-admission buffer are dedicated to a physical channel. By the coupling strategy, for input-queuing wormhole lane switches, the complexity of the crossbars can be simplified from 2p x p to (p + 1) x p, where p is the number of physical channels; for output-queuing wormhole lane switches, the additional complexity is also minimal. We evaluate the flit-admission solutions derived from the coupling with uniformly distributed random traffic in a 2D mesh network. Experimental results show that these solutions exhibit good performance in terms of latency and throughput.