Proposal and evaluation of a task migration protocol for NoC-based MPSoCs

Task migration is a well-known strategy adopted in distributed systems for load balancing. but the adoption of such strategy in NoC-based MPSoC is scarce in the literature. This paper proposes a complete task migration protocol for NoC-based MPSoCs. The migration transfers the task code, data and context to another PE. The paper presents the communication strategy to ensure coherence in the messages delivery, the heuristic to compute the new task location, and the procedure to inform the new task position. Results evaluate the cost of the task migration using a real MPSoC (described in synthesizable VHDL), demonstrating that the cost to migrate a given task has a small impact in the system performance, enabling its use to improve the overall system performance.