A traffic-aware adaptive routing algorithm on a highly reconfigurable network-on-chip architecture

In this paper, we propose a flexible NoC architecture and a dynamic distributed routing algorithm which can enhance the NoC communication performance with minimal energy overhead. In particular, our proposed NoC architecture exploits the following two features: i) self-reconfigurable bidirectional channels to increase the effective bandwidth and ii) express virtual paths, as well as localized hub routers, to bypass some intermediate nodes at run time in the network. A deadlock-free and traffic-aware dynamic routing algorithm is further developed for the proposed architecture, which can take advantage of the increased flexibility in the proposed architecture. Both the channels self-reconfiguration and routing decisions are made in a distributed fashion, based on a function of the localized traffic conditions, in order to maximize the performance and minimize the energy costs at the macroscopic level. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach can reduce the network latency by 30\% -80\% in most cases compared to a conventional unidirectional mesh topology, while incurring less than 15\% power overhead.