Effect of Application Mapping on Network-on-Chip Performance

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a developing and promising on-chip communication paradigm that improves scalability and performance of System-on-Chips. NoC design flow contains many problems from different areas, for example networking, embedded design and computer architecture. Application mapping is one of these problems, which is well studied in literature but generally considered as a communication energy minimization problem. The present study discusses the effect of application mapping on network parameters such as average queuing delay or packet loss rates of routers. On the other hand, self similarity is a phenomenon that is used to characterize Ethernet and/or wide area network traffic, as well as most of on-chip network traffic. The main concern of this study is to analyze the effect of application mapping on network related parameters by using an on-chip traffic characterization that contains self similarity. The results of our computational study show that mapping of cores may have a significant degenerative effect on network performance, and so adding network related terms to application mapping problem may improve the overall on-chip network performance considerably.