Design and Evaluation of Dynamically-Allocated Multi-queue Buffers with Multiple Packets for NoC Routers

A large portion of area and power in Network-on-Chip (NoC) routers is consumed by buffers, and hence these costly storage resources must be utilized well. However, some early related literatures are not suitable for modern NoC router architecture as well as various complicated traffic loads anymore. In this work, we first revisited the original dynamically-allocated multi-queue (DAMQ) buffer scheme and applied it to prevalently used virtual channel NoC routers. Furthermore, we propose a new DAMQ-based buffer organization that can accommodate multiple packets more than the number of virtual channels, named DAMQ with multiple packets (DAMQ-MP). The DAMQ-MP scheme can solve certain data transmission issues under some circumstances, such as heavy network congestion or short packets, to improve performance. Experimental results show that DAMQ-MP routers can have up to 24.52% higher saturated throughput than SAMQ and DAMQ counterparts.