Enhanced fault-tolerant Network-on-Chip architecture using hierarchical agents

The reliability is a vital aspect in the design of Network-on-Chip (NoC) based systems because a fault in communication medium may cause an overall system failure. On the other hand, performance degradation is an inescapable consequence of fault-tolerant architectures. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant NoC architecture that attains higher performance by using low cost agents in a hierarchical manner. These agents which are distributed all over the network, collect, process, and distribute different fault information. Moreover, we propose an enhanced fault-tolerant and congestion-aware routing method that exploits the classified fault information related to the permanent faults that might occur inside the links, network interfaces and different parts of the routers. The experimental results reveal that the proposed NoC architecture imposes small area and power overheads.