AUTO-GS: Self-Optimization of NoC Traffic through Hardware Managed Virtual Connections

Networks-on-Chip have shown their scalability for future many-core systems on chip. In real world scenarios, where multiple applications are being executed over a shared NoC based platform, efficient utilization of Networks-on-Chip resources becomes challenging. Methodologies are required to ensure better utilization of NoC, especially in the scenarios, where the communication patterns of NoC traffic are difficult to predict before run-time. In this paper, we propose a self-optimization mechanism which detects frequent communication by monitoring communication patterns at run-time and uses this information to establish virtual connections autonomously. Communication monitoring and connection establishment are realized in hardware. Hardware managed virtual connections lead to better utilization of NoC resources and reduce the communication latencies suffered by applications. In addition, energy consumption by the communication infrastructure is reduced. The proposed concept is investigated through simulation of real world application scenarios. The simulation results highlight the performance improvement and synthesis results show the low area overhead of the proposed hardware implementation.