Towards the Practical Design of Performance-Aware Resilient Wireless NoC Architectures

Recently, an improved surface wave-enabled communication fabric has been proposed to solve the reliability issues of emerging hybrid wired-wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) architectures. Thus, providing a promising solution to the performance and scalability demands of the fast-paced technological growth towards exascale and Big-Data processing on future System-on-Chip (SoC) design. However, WiNoCs trade-off optimized performance for cost by restricting the number of area and power hungry wireless nodes. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a low-latency adaptive router with a low-complexity single-cycle bypassing mechanism to alleviate the performance degradation due to the slow wired routers in such emerging hyhbrid NoCs. The proposed router is able to redistribute traffic in the network to alleviate average packet latency at both low and high traffic conditions. As a second contribution the paper presents an experimental evaluation of a practically implemented surface wave communication fabric. By reducing the latency between the wired nodes and wireless nodes the proposed router can improve performance efficiency in terms of average packet delay by an average of 50% in WiNoCs.