A novel non-minimal turn model for highly adaptive routing in 2D NoCs

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is emerging as a promising communication paradigm to overcome bottleneck of traditional bus-based interconnects for future micro-architectures (MPSoC and CMP). One of current issue in NoC routing is the use of acyclic channel dependency graph (ACDG) for deadlock freedom prohibiting certain routing turns. Thus, ACDG reduces the degree of adaptiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel nonminimal turn model which allows cycles in channel dependency graph provided that extended channel dependency graph is acyclic. Proposed turn model reduces number of restrictions on routing turns (specially on 90-degree), hence able to provide additional minimal and non-minimal routes between source and destination. We also propose a non-minimal and congestion-aware adaptive routing algorithm based on proposed turn model to demonstrate advantages. From results, we can observe that proposed method improves the network performance by distributing the traffic load in the non-congested regions.