A robust medium access mechanism for millimeter-wave Wireless Network-on-Chip architecture

Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) has emerged as a promising alternative to conventional wireline Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures for integrating hundreds of cores on the same die due to higher data bandwidth and energy-efficiency. Token-based medium access mechanism is used in several WiNoC architectures to enable a distributed and optimal utilization of the available wireless bandwidth among multiple transmitters. Consequently, failure of the token passing mechanism can significantly degrade the potential benefits of this novel interconnect technology. In this paper, we propose the design of a small-world WiNoC architecture augmented with a robust token management scheme to overcome the consequences of such failures.