Throughput-fairness tradeoff in Best Effort flow control for on-chip architectures

We consider two flow control schemes for best effort traffic in on-chip architectures, which can be deemed as the solutions to the boundary extremes of a class of utility maximization problem. At one extreme, we consider the so-called rate-sum flow control scheme, which aims at improving the performance of the underlying system by roughly maximizing throughput while satisfying capacity constraints. At the other extreme, we deem the max-min flow control, whose concern is to maintain max-min fairness in rate allocation by fairly sacrificing the throughput. We then elaborate our argument through a weighting mechanism in order to achieve a balance between the orthogonal goals of performance and fairness. Moreover, we investigate the implementation facets of the presented flow control schemes in on-chip architectures. Finally, we validate the proposed flow control schemes and the subsequent arguments through extensive simulation experiments.