Dynamic time-slot allocation for QoS enabled networks on chip

MP-SoCs are expected to require complex communication architectures such as NoCs. This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first algorithm to dynamically perform routing and allocation of guaranteed communication resources on NoCs that provide QoS with TDMA techniques. We test the efficiency of our algorithm by allocating the communication channels required for an application composed of a 3D pipeline and an MPEG-2 decoder/encoder video chain on a 16 node MP-SoC. Dynamism in the communication is created by the 3D application. On a StrongARM processor clocked at 200 MHz, the allocation time for one time-slot takes about 1000 cycles per hop in the connection. We show that central time-slot allocation algorithms are practical for small-scale MP-SoC systems. Indeed, our algorithm can compute the allocation of 40 connections for a complex scene of the 3D pipeline in 450 to 900 μs, depending on the slot table size.