A novel flow control scheme for best effort traffics in Network-on-Chip based on Weighted Max-Min-fairness

Abstract

Network on chip (NoC) has been proposed as an attractive alternative to traditional dedicated busses in order to achieve modularity and high performance in the future system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Recently, end to end flow control has gained popularity in the design process of network-on-chip based SoCs. Where flow control is employed, fairness issues need to be considered as well. In fact, one of most difficult aspects of flow control is that of treating all sources fairly when it is necessary to turn traffic away from the network. In this paper, we propose a flow control scheme which admits max-min fairness criterion for all sources. In fact, we formulate weighted max-min fairness criterion for the NoC architecture and present implementation to be used as flow control mechanism.