EDF as an arbitration policy for wormhole-switched priority-preemptive NoCs — Myth or fact?

A constant increase in the number of processors integrated within multiprocessor platforms led to more apparent contentions for the interconnect medium. Consequently, inter-processor communication latencies significantly outgrew the threshold until which their effects on the real-time analysis of multiprocessors can be discarded as negligible. Yet, despite its ever increasing importance, the contention analysis of interconnects is still in its infancy! In that vein, we propose a novel arbitration policy for interconnect routers, which is based on the EDF paradigm - a well-established approach in the scheduling theory. First, we elaborate on the practical aspects of this model and propose the worst-case traffic delay analysis. Then, we experimentally evaluate the approach against the state-of-the-art methods, and also investigate its practical limitations, so as to give a complete answer to the question posed in the title of this work.