A Reconfigurable NoC Platform Incorporating Real-Time Task Management Technique for H/W-S/W Codesign of Network Protocols

This paper presents the RCP (reconfigurable hardware-software codesign platform incorporating real-time task management technique) for hardware-software codesign of network protocols in SoC (system-on-chip) based system. In the RCP, we decompose a network protocol suite into real-time application-specific and reconfigurable hardware and software tasks. Such a task decomposition technique can improve co-design productivity by supporting the modularity and reuse of complex network protocol cores, thus enabling a higher level of abstraction in architectural modeling of network protocol specifications. Besides, the RCP provides coarse-grained and fine-grained real-time processing simultaneously for given application-specific real-time requirements. The coarse-grained real-time processing is supported at a level of task unit to enable real-time scheduling of network tasks. The fine-grained real-time processing is achieved at a level of a piece of data frame unit to enable real-time communication between decomposed tasks. A case study based on experiments is conducted to illustrate the application and efficiency of the proposed technique by implementing it in the Altera EPXA4 which is a commercial SoC platform.