A congestion-relief method for wormhole-routed 2D mesh networks

Abstract

With an increased number of processing elements on a chip, the transmission performance of traditional bus-based architecture attains to a bottleneck for system on a chip. To solve this issue, the Network-on-Chip concept was proposed. Congestion management mechanisms can be further improved performance in NoC, and they usually check congestion according to a specific message (buffer or link utilization). Nevertheless, that will lead to higher network implementation complexity such as hardware probes. In this study, we propose a method called automatic ramp control (ARC) that can improve network performance and avoid increasing network complexity. In our experiments, results show that the performance of our congestion-relief method is effective.