A high-quality global routing algorithm based on hybrid topology optimization and heuristic search for data processing in MEC

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT), real-time decision making has gradually become one of the important characteristics in mobile edge computing (MEC) environment of IoT. Therefore, in the Integrated Circuit (IC) design of MEC environment for IoT, low delay is one of the important optimization objectives. In the many routing competitions, wirelength, overflow, and runtime are the main evaluation standards, so how to reduce wirelength, overflow, and runtime has become a major challenge. However, the existing work lacks the excellent optimization ability in wirelength, overflow, and runtime, or only considers some of the optimization objectives. Therefore, we consider the wirelength, overflow, and runtime as the optimization objectives and propose a high-quality global routing algorithm of IC design in MEC environment, including the following effective strategies: (1) A hybrid topology optimization strategy combining Prim algorithm and divide-and-conquer method, (2) a heuristic search algorithm considering the congestion and the wirelength of nets. Due to the use of the Fast Lookup Table (FLUTE) algorithm to construct the topology of each net, there are too many Steiner points. For this reason, we used Prim algorithm and divide-and-conquer method to construct the topology, and thus it can avoid the problem of redundant Steiner points. In addition, we propose a congestion area identification method based on interval division to determine the area and order of nets to rip-up and reroute (R&R). Furthermore, a heuristic search algorithm that considers both the congestion and the wirelength of nets is used to optimize the total wirelength in the R&R stage. In terms of the total overflow, the total wirelength and the runtime, the experimental results show that the proposed strategies have achieved effective optimization, which can better satisfy the demand of low delay of IC design for data processing in MEC environments of IoT.