Requirements for network-on-chip benchmarking

This work presents the motivation, basic concepts, and requirements for benchmarking a network-on-chip (NoC). Currently there is practically no benchmark sets for NoC or the presented tools do not meet the requirements. The presented benchmarking method utilizes traffic generator with a dataflow models of the applications. Combined with transaction-level NoC, the abstract application model allows approximately 200× speedup and on average 10% error in estimated runtime w.r.t. cycle-accurate HW/SW cosimulation without exposing the exact internal functionality of the application.