Simple method to reduce congestion in bufferless network-on-chip

A simple method that reduces congestion in the bufferless network-on-chip (NoC) is proposed. The method uses the time average of link utilisation as its congestion measure, and is applicable to deflection routing algorithms. A cycle-based NoC simulator is used to evaluate a bufferless NoC with and without the congestion reduction, and the performance and energy consumption are found to improve under heavy load.