SDN-Based Circuit-Switching for Many-Cores
Marcelo Ruaro, Henrique Martins Medina, Fernando Gehm Moraes · 2017
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm adopted in computer networks that decouple the control logic from the physical to the software layer, reducing the routers' complexity and enabling a high-level network awareness. This work explores the SDN paradigm on NoCs to manage Circuit Switching (CS) connections in an original Multi-Physical Network (MPN) architecture. Related works focus its CS proposals only at the NoC context. This work proposes a CS design that covers all applications' lifetime stages, through a systemic many-core CS support that addresses both the hardware and software layers. The proposal explores the MPN's path diversity to provide a permanent CS during the real-time applications' lifetime. Results show that: (i) the MPN design provides a rich path diversity; (ii) the search path algorithm reaches success rates superior to 97% for 6 and 8 CS subnets; (iii) the SDN paradigm enables to adopt simple hardware infrastructures without software bottlenecks.