Power Distribution in NoCs Through a Fuzzy Based Selection Strategy for Adaptive Routing

Network-on-chip (NoC) is being proposed as a scalable and reusable communication platform for future embedded systems. The performance of NoC largely depends on the underlying deadlock-free and efficient routing algorithm. When the adaptive routing returns a set of acceptable output channels, then a selection strategy is used to select the output channel, therefore the selection strategy affects the efficiency of adaptive routing. In this paper a novel selection strategy for avoiding congested areas using a fuzzy-based routing decision is proposed that can be used with any adaptive routing algorithm. The objective of the proposed selection strategy is to choose a channel that has more free slots input buffer and lower power consumption. The routing path is established by minimizing a cost which is calculated by fuzzy controller and considers the power consumption and free slots input buffer of cores. Performance evaluation is carried out by using a flit-accurate simulator under different traffic scenarios. Result experiments show that the proposed selection strategy applied to Odd-Even routing algorithm can effectively improves average delay and power consumption to meet power balance requirement and avoid hotspot with low hardware overhead.