GLB — Efficient Global Load Balancing method for moderating congestion in on-chip networks

Network Congestion can limit the performance of NoC due to increased transmission latency and power consumption. In this paper, to reduce the network congestion, we present an efficient congestion-aware routing method, named Global Load Balancing (GLB). In GLB, packets aggregate and carry congestion information along a path they route. Consequently, this information contains a global view of the path from where the packet is routed. This global congestion information is used as a metric in the arbitration unit in order to give more priority to the packets arriving from congested area. GLB can efficiently balance the load across the links by steering traffic from highly congested regions to low congested areas. Experimental results with synthetic test cases demonstrate that the GLB method provides significant improvement in average network latency (>;19%).