NETWORK-ON-CHIP WITH EQUALITY-OF-SERVICE: A LOCAL FAIR RUNTIME ARBITRATION METHOD FOR GLOBAL FAIR BANDWIDTH SHARE

This paper presents a network-on-chip (NoC) with equality-of-service (EoS), having local fair runtime arbitration schemes to perform global fair bandwidth shares between packets flowing in the NoC. The proposed throughput-balance-aware (TBA) arbitration scheme selects competing packets to access the same router output port based on flows. The TBA method just requires one pipeline arbitration stage, resulting in a low routing cycle. The flow detection is made locally at runtime and is enabled by the attachment of a local identity-tag (ID-tag) on each header flit of a packet. The scheme enables the flit-level packet flow overlapping, which is the main advantageous characteristic of our NoC. A hotspot traffic scenario is used to test the NoC performance. The simulation test presents that the proposed arbitration method performs a global fair bandwidth sharing effectively.