CATRA- congestion aware trapezoid-based routing algorithm for on-chip networks

Congestion occurs frequently in Networks-on-Chip when the packets demands exceed the capacity of network resources. Congestion-aware routing algorithms can greatly improve the network performance by balancing the traffic load in adaptive routing. Commonly, these algorithms either rely on purely local congestion information or take into account the congestion conditions of several nodes even though their statuses might be out-dated for the source node, because of dynamically changing congestion conditions. In this paper, we propose a method to utilize both local and non-local network information to determine the optimal path to forward a packet. The non-local information is gathered from the nodes that not only are more likely to be chosen as intermediate nodes in the routing path but also provide up-to-date information to a given node. Moreover, to collect and deliver the non-local information, a distributed propagation system is presented.