Design of a High-Throughput NoC Router with Neighbor Flow Regulation

The throughput of a Network-on-Chip (NoC) mainly depends on the specific router microarchitecture design. Besides, coordination among routers also plays an important role in the performance of NoC, since router behaviors are closely related, especially between neighbors. In this work we focus on such strong tie between neighbor routers and propose a novel router microarchitecture design with neighbor flow regulation (NFR). We use simple logic and several low-cost wires to build an additional regulation network. Each module in the network collects information of flows in neighbor routers and regulates the arbitration schemes on them to prevent congestion and starvation. Simulation results show that our router design with NFR mechanisms can increase network throughput by 6.7% on average, and is able to achieve nearly 28% improvement in switch matching efficiency under hot-spot traffic.