Differentiation of MPSoCs message classes using multiple NoCs

Abstract

MPSoCs using a distributed memory architecture generates a large volume of messages that may be classified in application messages, as defined by the application developer, and management messages, used to ensure the correct operation of the platform. Both messages classes normally use the same communication infrastructure. Thus, the application traffic can be adversely impacted by the management traffic. Several works observe that different messages classes can be distributed into multiple NoCs, improving the performance and power consumption of the platform. However, these works mainly target shared memory systems. This work suggests the utilization of multiple NoCs in an MPSoC using distributed memory architecture, specializing each network for different message classes. An improvement of up to 40% in the application messages jitter and an average improvement of 5% in the application execution time can be achieved using this strategy.