EEEP: an extreme end to end flow control protocol for SDRAM access through networks on chip

Abstract

MPSoC platforms face an increasing diversity of traffic requirements due to the interaction between cores. This interaction is driven by the applications run by the user, and leads to the coexistence of the best effort traffic and the guaranteed service traffic in the same platform. We propose Extreme End-to-End Protocol (EEEP) as a new end-to-end flow control protocol to access SDRAMs through a multiport memory controller in NoC-based MPSoCs. Our protocol considers the memory access within a system approach. It exploits the occupancy rate of the requests queue in the memory controller within the policy of the traffic injection at the master Network Interfaces (NIs) level. By controlling the best-effort traffic shape, EEEP improves the bandwidth and the latency of the guaranteed service traffic.