Online bicast allocation algorithm for contention-free-routing NoCs

The demand on network-on-chips (NoCs) with quality of service guarantees for real-time applications has been massively increasing in the last few years. One of the main techniques used for providing such networks is time-division-multiplexing (TDM) since it provides hard bandwidth and latency guarantees along with better resources utilization. In this paper, a runtime bicast algorithm is proposed for allocating the TDM slots in a contention-free-routing NoC. The proposed algorithm is evolved from a state-of-the art TDM allocation algorithm for point-to-point connections. The bicast algorithm shows merit in time-to-bandwidth efficiency for 80.12% of the total possible bicast connections with an average improvement of 37.76% compared with the unicast algorithm.