A novel flow fluidity meter for BiNoC bandwidth resource allocation

An enhanced on-chip network resource allocation method is developed for the Bi-directional Network-on-Chip (BiNoC) platform. Specifically, a novel flow Fluidity Meter (FM) is proposed to provide the real-time estimate of bandwidth utilization of the Virtual Channel (VC) buffer in a BiNoC router. The degree of fluidity of a packet transfer in each router is a reliable, yet low-cost method for measuring bandwidth utilization in the VC. We show that the overhead implementing this FM is very affordable. Finally, extensive simulation results verify that this proposed FM approach achieves superior performance compared to existing BiNoC resource allocation methods.