Flow-aware allocation for on-chip networks

Abstract

Current Virtual-Channel routers disregard potentially useful information about on-chip communication flows. This often leads to inefficient resource utilisation in existing Networks-on-Chips for flow-based communication patterns. The flow-based traffic exhibited by forthcoming applications requiring large streaming datasets (sophisticated graphical interfaces, mobile connectivity, scientific applications, etc.) lead us to propose flow additions to a Virtual-Channel network. Our flow-based refinements infer the presence of, and allocate resources to flows rather than individual packets. As a consequence, we are able to demonstrate speedups of close to 40% for synthetic flow-based traffic patterns.