RMAP: A Reliability-Aware Application Mapping for Network-on-Chips

This paper proposes a reliability-aware application mapping for mesh-based NoCs. The proposed reliable mapping, called RMAP, adds redundant communications to the application graph in order to improve the reliability of packet delivery in NoCs. The RMAP divides the application graph into two sub-graphs which have the lowest possible communication with each other. One of the sub-graphs is mapped on the upper triangular nodes of the NoC and the other is mapped on the lower triangular nodes. In this way, lower traffic load is imposed on some channels which are efficiently used to route packets of redundant communications. This minimizes the overheads imposed to the NoC due to redundant communications. A cycle accurate NoC simulator is used to evaluate the reliability and performance of the proposed mapping. The RMAP is also compared with the previously proposed reliability improvement methods, e.g., flow-control and flood-based methods. Simulation results reveal that the RMAP improves the reliability of an unprotected NoC by about 20%, while its performance overhead is lower than the other methods.