Fault Localization in NoCs Exploiting Periodic Heartbeat Messages in a Many-Core Environment

Abstract

This paper presents a novel fault localization approach for NoCs by leveraging so called timed heartbeat messages. While these messages are periodically sent to report health states of processor cores to a fault detection unit, information about the network health state (topology) can be extracted from their timing behavior. We show how this health state information can be easily extracted from the message arrival times and give an estimation of the expected costs for this technique.