CARS: Congestion-aware request scheduler for network interfaces in NoC-based manycore systems

Network congestion is a critical issue of memory parallelism in network-based manycore systems where multiple memories can be accessed simultaneously. Therefore, a congestion-aware method is necessitated to deal with the network congestion. In this paper, we present a streamlined method in order to reduce the network congestion. The idea is to use the global congestion information as a metric in network interfaces to reduce the congestion level of highly congested areas. Network interfaces connected to memory modules are equipped with an adaptive scheduler using the global congestion information to reduce additional traffic to congested areas. Experimental results with synthetic test cases demonstrate that the on-chip network utilizing the proposed adaptive scheduler presents up to 23% improvement in average latency.