Effect of Virtual Channels for a Fault-Tolerant XY Routing Method with the Passage of Faulty Nodes

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the effect of Virtual Channels (VCs) for our novel proposed fault-tolerant routing method which allows the passage of faulty nodes in Network on Chips (NoCs). Conventional fault-tolerant routing methods can be classified into two approaches; that is, (1) approach with VCs and (2) that without VCs. However, due to the large difference in the hardware amount required for the implementation, performance comparison has not been made between those approaches. VCs can be added for congestion mitigation; therefore, they can be added to even the methods based on (2). In this paper, we employ VCs in our method [6] which is based on (2) and make performance comparison between our method with Chalasani's method [2] which necessitates four VCs. Simulation results show that our method with four VCs can reduce average communication latency by about 96%, compared with Chalasani's method.