ACO-Based Deadlock-Aware Fully-Adaptive Routing in Network-on-Chip Systems

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a problem-solving technique inspired by the behavior of real-world ant colony. ACO-based routing also has high potential on balancing the traffic load in the domain of Network-on-Chip (NoC), where the performance is generally dominated by traffic distribution and routing. Since the pheromone in ACO provides both spatial and temporal network information, we find ACO-based routing suitable for reducing the probability of deadlock and its penalty. With the three schemes inspired by the behavior of ants and named as ACO-based Deadlock-Aware Routing (ACO-DAR), our simulation shows that the occurrence of deadlock can be greatly suppressed and the network performance also improves as a consequence. Moreover, ACO-DAR makes use of the existing hardware of the original ACO-based routing, so the area overhead is minor and ACO-DAR is thus cost-effective.