Slack-time aware routing in NoC systems

Efficient routing schemes are essential if network on chip (NoC) architectures are to be used for implementing multi-core systems for real-time multimedia applications. These systems will be characterized by internal communication traffic which is a mix of traffic requiring guaranteed throughput (GT) and other traffic requiring some other QoS properties like low latency or low packet drop probability. Communication resources are generally reserved for providing GT performance. In this paper, we propose a dynamic scheme for improving the QoS of other traffic by intelligently utilizing the links on the GT paths for BE (best effort) traffic when there is a slack in the GT traffic, that is, the GT communication volume is smaller than the reserved capacity. In our scheme, the GT source manages and distributes the slack time based on estimated BE traffic. We show the effectiveness of our scheme by simulation.