Contention-aware selection strategy for application-specific network-on-chip

Network-on-chip (NoC) performance largely depends on the underlying deadlock-free and efficient routing algorithm. The effectiveness of any adaptive routing algorithm strongly depends on the underlying selection strategy. When the routing function returns a set of admissible output channels with cardinality greater than one, a selection function is used to select the output channel to which the packet will be forwarded. In this study a novel selection strategy, LATEX, is proposed that can be used with any adaptive routing algorithm for specified applications. The objective of the proposed selection strategy is to efficiently balance traffic load and reach better performance results. Performance evaluation is carried out by using a flit-accurate simulator under two real traffic scenarios. Result experiments show that the proposed selection strategy applied to several routing algorithms significantly improves average delay, max delay and power consumption.