Network Coding in Networks-on-Chip with Lossy Links

Providing a reliable and efficient communication infrastructure becomes more important and more demanding for current and future Many-core System-on-Chips. The increased amount of communication partners demands for efficient resource usage. At the same time, an ongoing feature size reduction and supply-voltage level reduction renders the SoC vulnerable to bit errors. Our work aims at providing a generalized analysis of network-coded Networks-on-Chip with multicast support and unreliable links. We compare network-coded with dimension-routed NoCs in terms of their hop counts and achievable long-term rates. The results show that for an 8x8 2D-mesh setup, network-coding yields a 1.7x to 8.3x better hop count and can achieve a 1.2x to 3.7x higher rate as dimension-routed 8x8 NoCs for bit error probabilities of 10(-12) to 10(-3) and 10% multicast traffic.