Bounded arbitration algorithm for QoS-supported on-chip communication

Time-critical multi-processor systems require guaranteed services in terms of throughput, bandwidth etc. in order to comply to hard real-time constraints. However, guaranteed-service schemes suffer from low resource utilization. To the best of our knowledge, we are presenting the first approach for on-chip communication that provides a high resource utilization under a transaction-specific, flexible (i.e. different classifications on data exchange) communication scheme. It does provide tight time-related guarantees. Hence, we are presenting our bounded arbitration scheme considering lower and upper bounds for each type of transaction level. We demonstrate its advantages by means of a complete MPEG4 decoder case study and achieve under these constraints a bandwidth utilization of up to 100%, on an average 97% with a guaranteed (100%) bandwidth.