An Energy Efficient Load Balancing Selection Strategy for Adaptive NoC Routers

Abstract

Modern chip multi core systems are using Network on Chip (NoC) as the communication infrastructure. Effective output channel selection techniques are used in adaptive routers, which form the back bone of NoC systems to reduce the average packet latency of inter-core communications in multi-core systems. We propose a selection strategy, Cool Centers, for output port selection that ensures load balancing on a mesh NoC system. Cool centers reduces the possibility of traffic hot-spot formation in the network and can be applied on any minimal adaptive routing algorithm for improving the system performance. The proposed system equally distributes the traffic load among the available minimal paths without any significant architectural overhead. This reduces the rate of non-uniform wear and tear of routers and links, and prevent early aging of chips.