Architectural Techniques for Improving Performance in Networks on Chip

Sammanfattning: The main aim of this thesis is to propose enhancing techniques for the performance in Networks on Chips. In addition, a concrete proposal for a protocol stack within our NoC platform Nostrum is presented. Nostrum inherently supports both Best Effort as well as Guaranteed Throughput traffic delivery. It employs a deflective routing scheme for best effort traffic delivery that gives a small footprint of the switches in combination with robustness to disturbances in the network. For the traffic delivery with hard guarantees a TDMA based scheme is used. During the transmission process in a NoC several stages are involved. In the papers included, I propose a set of strategies to enhance the performance in several of these stages. The strategies are summarised as followsTemporally Disjoint Networks is that a physical network, potentially, can be seen to contain a set of separate networks that a packet can enter dependenton when it enters the physical network. This has the consequence that wecould have different traffic types in the different networks.Looped containers provide means to set up virtual circuits in networksusing deflective routing. High priority container packets are inserted intothe network to follow a predefined, closed, route between source and destination.At sender side the packets are loaded and sent to the destination where it is unloaded and sent back.Proximity Congestion Awareness reduces the load of the network by diverting packets away from congested areas. It can increase the maximum trafficload by a factor of 20.Dual Packet Exit increases the exit bandwidth of the network leading to a50 percent reduction in worst-case latency and a 30 percent reduction inaverage latency as well as a lowered buffer usage.Priority Based Forced Requeue prematurely lifts out low priority packetsfrom the network to be requeued. Packets that have not yet entered the network compete with packets inside the network which gives tighter boundson admission with a reduction of worst case latencies by 50 percent.Furthermore, Operational Efficiency is proposed as a measure to quantifyhow effective a network is and is defined as the throughput per buffers used in the system. An increase of the injection of packets into the network to increase the system throughput will have a cost associated to it and can be optimised to save energy.