QLT: A flow control strategy for wormhole network-on-chip

Abstract

The fact that the on-chip network will suddenly get saturated indicates that it is necessary to devise an effective flow control strategy. Through tracing the status of the network buffer space we found that the payload of the on-chip network can not get beyond an upper bound to avoid vicious congestion. Specifically, quarter of the total network buffer space is such a threshold, which is termed Quarter Load Threshold (QLT). Based on this fact we present the Quarter Load Threshold (QLT) flow control strategy. The performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated by the open source simulator Noxim [2]. Simulation results show that the on-chip network runs smoothly and no serious congestion is encountered any more.