MWPF: A Deadlock Avoidance Fully Adaptive Routing Algorithm in Networks-on-Chip

The fully adaptive routing algorithms for Networks-On-Chip (NoC) based on number of packets held in a virtual channel (VC), can be classified into two main groups: 1) Traditional fully adaptive routing algorithms which only one packet reside in a VC at the same time. 2) Whole packet forwarding (WPF) which multiple packets can be resided in a VC. Based on an analysis, the WPF as regards multiple packets can be held in a VC, suffers from the full output buffer problem. This problem increases the overall input packet latency. In this paper, a fully adaptive routing algorithm is presented (MWPF). Compared with TFA and WPF, our design achieves an average 65.3% and 35.4% latency improvement, respectively. 38.4% and 24.3% saturation throughput improvement in the standard synthetic traffic pattern. Compared with WPF an average 26% and 61% maximum latency reduction on SPLASH-2 benchmarks running on a 49-core CMP. Our design also offers higher performance than partially adaptive and deterministic routing algorithms.