A Buffer Reservation Scheduling Strategy for Enhancing Performance of NoC Router Bypassing
Zi-Xuan Liu, Yaoyao Ye · 2025
Network-on-Chip (NoC) is one of the key technologies for augmenting performance and energy efficiency of many-core processors, which addresses the limitations of conventional bus architecture. Flow control in NoC manages the allocation of buffers and links, as well as determines resource assignment among packets. Bypass flow control further optimizes this process by permitting certain packets to bypass specific router pipelines to diminish router latency. Nonetheless, bypass flow control necessitates the assurance of conflict-free bypass paths and the availability of buffers at the destinations. In this work, we propose a Buffer Reservation Scheduling strategy (BuffeRS) aimed at enhancing NoC performance by increasing secure bypass packet transmissions within a time period. BuffeRS enables packets to reach their destinations via regular transmission or dynamically generated private bypass paths. By designating specific roles to router groups within corresponding time slots, BuffeRS ensures that destination buffers are reserved before packet arrival. We further delineate router microarchitecture design to implement BuffeRS in NoC. Simulation results demonstrate an average performance enhancement by 17.9%~43% under synthetic traffic and by 6.23% under PARSEC benchmarks in full-system simulations, as compared to contemporary state-of-the-art works.