Support Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Multicast in Bufferless Network-on-Chip

Chaochao FENG  Zhonghai LU  Axel JANTSCH  Minxuan ZHANG  Xianju YANG 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E95-D  No.4  pp.1052-1061
Publication Date: 2012/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Computer System
Keyword: 
bufferless network-on-chip,  deflection routing,  multicast,  fault-tolerance, 

Full Text: PDF(1.8MB)

Summary: 
In this paper, we propose three Deflection-Routing-based Multicast (DRM) schemes for a bufferless NoC. The DRM scheme without packets replication (DRM_noPR) sends multicast packet through a non-deterministic path. The DRM schemes with adaptive packets replication (DRM_PR_src and DRM_PR_all) replicate multicast packets at the source or intermediate node according to the destination position and the state of output ports to reduce the average multicast latency. We also provide fault-tolerant supporting in these schemes through a reinforcement-learning-based method to reconfigure the routing table to tolerate permanent faulty links in the network. Simulation results illustrate that the DRM_PR_all scheme achieves 41%, 43% and 37% less latency on average than that of the DRM_noPR scheme and 27%, 29% and 25% less latency on average than that of the DRM_PR_src scheme under three synthetic traffic patterns respectively. In addition, all three fault-tolerant DRM schemes achieve acceptable performance degradation at various link fault rates without any packet lost.