User satisfaction aware routing decisions in NOC

In mobile devices, user satisfaction with the UI interactions ought to be the primary design driver. Some recent research has integrated a saturating, non-linear user satisfaction function in thread scheduler. Mobile embedded systems are moving towards large systems on chip (SoCs) with a Network on Chip (NoC). The inter-thread communication in such a system is hosted by the NoC as a flow. The application and operating system level user satisfaction research assumes that the throughput of inter-thread edges is limited only by the computational constraints of the nodes. With NoC, however, NoC resource allocation policies play an important role in the application level user satisfaction. In this paper, we filter down the user satisfaction from an application level attribute to the routers to improve the QoS at the routing level in order to leverage the user satisfaction at the application and system level. We demonstrate that this technique improves the user satisfaction of MP3 application by 10% while maintaining the QoS guarantee of MPEG-2 application.