Algorithms for power-efficient QoS in application specific NoCs
Hao He, Gongming Yang, Jiang Hu · 2014
Quality-of-Service (QoS) is a fundamental part of Networks-on-Chip (NoC) design. In application specific NoCs, guaranteed QoS is often obtained by static bandwidth reservation at design-time. The bandwidth allocation inevitably affects power-efficiency, which is crucial yet largely neglected in prior NoC QoS methods. In this work, we develop two algorithmic techniques that concurrently address power-efficiency and QoS. One is path-based integer linear programming (ILP) and the other is a negotiation-based heuristic. Both techniques support multiple user-cases. Simulation results show that our techniques significantly outperform an iterative greedy heuristic and are order of magnitude faster than conventional edge-based ILP.