Comparison of mesh and honeycomb network-on-chip architectures

Rectangular Mesh is the most commonly used topology in the field of Network-on-Chip (NoC) due to its high regularity, symmetry and scalability. In this paper, we examine Honeycomb topology as another candidate for NoC architectures. Based on the simulations of Mesh and Honeycomb routers and network, we compare these two topologies in terms of power consumption, area cost and communication delay. Results show that Honeycomb topology outperforms Mesh by at least 25.9%, 54.2% and 30.0% in these three aspects.