A scheduling approach for packet-switched on-chip networks

Abstract

Performance constraints imposed on the on-Chip System (SoC) design require efficiency and predictability of inter-core communication part in system. This implies the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirement assurance for the communication. The current work presents a novel approach that borrows three Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) scheduling algorithms and adapts them to Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). This technique is designed specifically for multimedia and safety-critical real-time applications to reduce contention problem in packet-switched networks and provides QoS guarantees in terms of throughput and end-to-end latency. An HDL implementation of a NoC architecture has been simulated to prove our concept.