An improved minimal multicast routing algorithm for mesh-based Networks-on-Chip

Microprocessor architectures trend to include more and more cores. To achieve high performance of multicore parallel computing´s low-latency and high-throughput, Networks-on-Chip (NoC) are required. Multicast is also a key characteristic to meet the communications performances requirements. However, current multicast algorithm may not have enough ability to ensure communication performance. We propose a new distributed multicast routing algorithm using the shortest path to each destination, meanwhile focusing on minimizing the link usage. By building a tree of fully-used shared path and appending other destinations to the tree, we can obtain the minimal link usage multicast tree. The performance results show that, for an 8×8 mesh topology, at 0.05 injection rates, our scheme reduced 45% of latency than RPM.