Study of Application of Network Coding on NoCs for Multicast Communications

Embedded Systems-on-Chips are becoming more complex and multi-functional, consist of tens or hundreds of integrated IPs supporting one or several applications. For such systems, Network-on-Chip (NoC) is proposed to overcome the communication challenges and bandwidth bottlenecks. In this work, we propose the use of Network Coding (NC) for NoC-based SoC to improve performance in terms of latency and power consumption. Network coding is a technique allows nodes to combine arriving packets into encoded packets instead of simply forwarding them. NC aims to optimize data flow leading to improve network throughput and reliability. This paper discusses the feasibility of NC for multicast communication in NoC and presents a set of algorithms to select intermediate nodes in order to apply NC, also introduces a heuristic to rapidly identify the applicability of NC according to the relative positions of sources and destinations nodes. Moreover we evaluate NC potential for multicast communication over various NoC sizes under different evaluation parameters (number of hops, steps and live packets). It was possible to achieve performance improvement by reducing the total number of hops by 24% and total number of live packets by 35%. These results demonstrate the potential of NC to enhance NoC performance.