Architectural Issues in Homogeneous NoC-Based MPSoC

Multi-processors systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) are becoming increasingly popular in embedded systems for the high degree of performance and flexibility they permit. While most MPSoCs are today highly heterogeneous for better fitting the target applications, homogeneous systems may become in a near future a viable alternative bringing other benefits such as run-time load balancing. The work presented in this paper relies on a homogenous NoC-based MPSoC framework we developed which allows us to conduct evaluations of 3 different techniques: proactive/reactive communication, preemptive task mapping and task replication. The impact on the system performance is discussed for several mappings of a MJPEG decoder application.