Combined Centralized and Distributed Connection Allocation in Large TDM Circuit Switching NoCs
Yong Chen, Emil Matúš, Gerhard Paul Fettweis · 2017
The centralized methods for connection allocation in a circuit-switched network-on-chip (NoC) based on time-division multiplexing (TDM) may pose serious performance and scalability issues in large-scale networks due to the 1) limited path search speed, 2) increasing allocation request rate at central unit and 3) the increasing communication cost between the central unit and NoC nodes. This paper tackles this problem by proposing a combined centralized-distributed approach that splits the original NoC into multiple non-overlapping logical partitions, each of them served by a dedicated NoC-Manager unit. The NoC-Manager employs fast trellis-search shortest path algorithm enabling local path search inside the associated NoC partition, while a set of NoC-Managers jointly combine the partial results in a distributed manner in order to find the most likely global path. This approach attempts to combine the benefits of distributed and centralized systems, whilst the experimental results demonstrate its high potential regarding performance and scalability improvement.