Path-Congestion-Aware Adaptive Routing With a Contention Prediction Scheme for Network-on-Chip Systems

Network-on-chip systems can achieve higher performance than bus systems for chip multiprocessor systems. However, as the complexity of the network increases, the channel and switch congestion problems become major performance bottlenecks. An effective adaptive routing algorithm can help minimize path congestion through load balancing. However, conventional adaptive routing schemes only use channel-based information to detect the congestion status. Due to the lack of switch-based information, channel-based information is difficult to reveal the real congestion status along the routing path. Therefore, in this paper, we remodel the path congestion information to show hidden spatial congestion information and improve the effectiveness of routing path selection. We propose a path-congestion-aware adaptive routing (PCAR) scheme based on the following techniques: 1) a path-congestion-aware selection strategy that simultaneously considers switch congestion and channel congestion, and 2) a contention prediction technique that uses the rate of change in the buffer level to predict possible switch contention. The experimental results show that the proposed PCAR scheme can achieve a high saturation throughput with an improvement of 15.4%-48.7% compared to existing routing schemes. The proposed PCAR method also includes a VLSI architecture, which has higher area efficiency with an improvement of 16%-35.7% compared with the other router designs.