Investigating the effect of virtual channel on the performance of network-on-chip
Date
2017-01-23
Authors
Ahmad, Adnan
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Abstract
Network-on-Chip(NoC) is the communication backbone in domain of of multi-core processor systems. As the number of cores in conventional bus based architecture is increasing communication techniques are becoming ineffective and complex. Wormhole flow control is the most commonly used flow control algorithm in NoC. However as the work load is increased in the NoC wormhole flow control causes head-of-line blocking which results in contention for the physical channel. This issue can be resolved by using virtual channel flow control. In this work we investigate the effect of input-queued Virtual Channels router model on the performance of NoC by varying differnt parametrs like injection rate and the packet length. We simulate K-ary-n cubes mesh topology with dimension order routing (DOR) under synthetic workloads in order to find the effect of virtual channels on the performance of Mesh network in term of throughput and latency. We show that as the number of virtual channels is increased there is an improvement in the throughput and latency of the network up to a certain number of virtual channels beyond which the network reaches saturated state. Our work can be used as a guidance to find the optimal number of virtual channels for a given NoC configuration and traffic parameters.