Position-based weighted round-robin arbitration for equality of service in many-core network-on-chips

Abstract

This paper presents the position-based weighted round-robin arbitration for equality of service in many-core network-on-chips employing a deterministic routing algorithm. We concentrate on the network saturation induced by the hot-spot traffic that occurs when the threads running on the system simultaneously access shared data, global shared locks, etc. It exploits the deterministic properties of the interconnect network---the topology and the routing algorithm. This leads to the omission of additional information in packet headers, compared to the previous approaches. The hardware overhead is minimal, requiring only the weight counters in addition to a typical round-robin arbiter. Compared with the previous work, the proposed algorithm also reduces the critical path delay due to its simplicity. Although designed against the hot-spot traffic, the proposed arbitration scheme shows little performance degradation under other traffic patterns in terms of the average latency and the saturation throughput.