Achieving composability in NoC-based MPSoCs through QoS management at software level

Multiprocessors systems on chip (MPSoCs) have become the de-facto standard in embedded systems. The use of Networks-on-chip (NoCs) provides to these platforms scalability and support for parallel transactions. The computational power of these architectures enables the simultaneous execution of several applications, with different time constraints. However, as the number of applications executing simultaneously increases, the performance of such applications may be affected due to resources sharing. To ensure applications requirements are met, mechanisms are necessary for ensuring proper isolation. Such a feature is referred to as composability. As the NoC is the main shared component in NoC-based MPSoCs, quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms are mandatory to meet application requirements in term of communication. In this work, we propose a hardware/software approach to achieve applications composability by means of QoS management mechanisms at the software level. The conducted experiments show the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of throughput, latency and jitter for a real time application sharing communication resources with best-effort applications.