A Cost Effective Centralized Adaptive Routing for Networks-on-Chip

As the number of applications and programmable units in CMPs and MPSoCs increases, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) encounters unpredictable, heterogeneous and time dependent traffic loads. This motivates the introduction of adaptive routing mechanisms that balance the NoC's loads and achieve higher throughput compared with traditional oblivious routing schemes. An effective adaptive routing scheme should be based on a global view of the network state. However, most current adaptive routing schemes, following off-chip networks, are based on distributed reactions to local congestion. In this paper we leverage the unique on-chip capabilities and introduce a novel paradigm of NoC centralized adaptive routing. Our scheme continuously monitors the global traffic load in the network and modifies the routing of packets to improve load balancing accordingly. We present a specific design for the case of mesh topology, where XY or YX routes are adaptively selected for each source-destination pair. We show that while our implementation is lightweight and scalable in hardware costs, it outperforms oblivious and distributed adaptive routing schemes in terms of load balancing and average packet delay.