Buffer-Aware Analysis for Worst-Case Traversal Time of Real-Time Traffic over RRA-based NoCs
Meng Liu, Matthias Becker, Moris Behnam, Thomas Nolte · 2017
Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a communication subsystem which has been widely utilized in many-core processors and system-on-chips in general. In order to execute time-critical applications on a NoC-based platform, the timing behavior of the network needs to be predicted during system design. One of the most important timing requirements is regarding schedulability, which refers to determining if a real-time packet can be delivered within a specific time duration. To verify the fulfillment of such timing requirement, a proper timing analysis is mandatory. Our work focuses on a Round-Robin Arbitration (RRA) based wormhole-switched NoC, which is a common architecture used in many of the existing implementations. Recursive Calculus (RC) is one of the existing analysis approaches for RRA-based NoCs which has been utilized in many research works. However, RC does not take buffer-effects into account. As a result, while performing RC on most of the existing RRA-based NoC designs, it can produce unsafe estimates which is not acceptable for time-critical systems. In this paper, we identify the optimistic problem of RC, and we propose a Revised Recursive Calculus (RRC) which extends RC by considering buffer-effects as well as supporting packetization.