A dependency-graph based priority assignment algorithm for real-time traffic over NoCs with shared virtual-channels

Abstract

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the on-chip interconnection medium of choice for modern massively parallel processors and System-on-Chip (SoC) in general. Fixed-priority based preemptive scheduling using virtual-channels is a solution to support real-time communications in on-chip networks. Targeting the priority assignment problem in the context of NoCs, heuristic based priority assignment algorithms are more practical, due to the exponentially increased search space as the number of flows goes up. In our previous work, we have proposed a graph-based heuristic priority assignment algorithm (called GHSA) for NoC communications, where we show that taking the dependencies between flows into account can significantly reduce the search space. However, GHSA only works for NoCs with distinct priorities. Routers in such type of platforms may have a large amount of buffer cost when the number of flows is high. The applicability can thus be limited in reality. One solution to reduce the buffer cost is to allow priority sharing of different flows. In this paper, we propose a dependency-graph based priority assignment algorithm (called eGHSA) targeting NoCs with shared virtual-channels. A number of experiments as well as a case study based on an automotive application are generated, which clearly show that eGHSA improves the efficiency compared to the existing solution in the literature.