Modelling and analysis of wireless communication over Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

Multi-cores and many-cores are becoming the next computing platform with the interconnection bus becoming the new bottleneck. The bus is replaced by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) for scalability issues. However, the NoC still being RC-wire based links, there are limitations in the transmission speed. As we reach far more denser integration, the problem is likely to aggravate. Wireless interconnects holds a good promise to solve the speed and scalability issue. In this paper we analyse the improvements offered by wireless links as shortcut interconnects in wormhole based NoCs. We measure latency and throughput and observe their variations by altering congestion level, represented by Packet Injection Rate (PIR) and channel count. Using a simple Media Access Control (MAC) protocol we analyse the effect of number of channels and traffic, demonstrating the advantage of using wireless NoC.