Hierarchical agent based NoC with dynamic online services

As the size of NoCs increases, power consumption and fault/variation tolerance have become two of the most crucial problems for system designers. To address these problems, we propose a NoC architecture based on a hierarchy of monitoring agents. By tracing the circuit properties at run time, the agents at different architectural levels are able to monitor and control over the whole NoC platform. This monitoring approach partitions various online diagnostic and management services onto hierarchical implementation levels so as to provide scalability and variability for large-scale NoC design. This paper explains the monitoring interaction between agent levels, and focuses on system optimization alternatives handled by different agent levels. It further quantitatively analyzes the feasibility and design alternatives in monitoring communication interconnection upon regular tile-based NoC layout.