LADPM: Latency-Aware Dual-Partition Multicast Routing for Mesh-Based Network-on-Chips

Networks-on-Chips (NoCs) provides an efficient architectural paradigm as interconnect for state-of-the-art Chip Multi-processors (CMPs). With the increasing development of novel applications in NoCs, one-to-many (multicast) or one-to-all (broadcast) communications are becoming universal and indispensable. The performance constraint metrics, such as power consumption and network latency, are often stringent on NoC systems. Without multicast support, the performance of traditional NoCs will be significantly degraded by such communications. In this paper, we propose Latency-Aware Dual-Partition Multicast (LADPM) routing for mesh-based on-chip networks to reduce packet latency and balance network load. A detailed wormhole router design is also presented for the proposed LADPM scheme. LADPM scheme can adaptively make routing decision based on the distribution of the destination nodes of the multicast traffic. Experimental results, implemented under a cycle-accurate simulator, show that compared with the best known multicast scheme RPM, LADPM reduces Energy-Delay Product by 25.4% on average. More importantly, in heavy traffic load networks, LADPM is a scalable solution.