SD-MAC: Design and Synthesis of a Hardware-Efficient Collision-Free QoS-Aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Network-on-Chip

To bridge the widening gap between computation requirements and communication efficiency faced by gigascale heterogeneous SoCs in the upcoming ubiquitous era, a new on-chip communication system, dubbed Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC), is introduced by using the recently developed CMOS UWB wireless interconnection technology. In this paper, a synchronous and distributed medium access control (SD-MAC) protocol is designed and implemented. Tailored for WNoC, SD-MAC employs a binary countdown approach to resolve channel contention between RF nodes. The receiver_select_sender mechanism and hidden terminal elimination scheme are proposed to increase the throughput and channel utilization of the system. Our simulation study shows the promising performance of SD-MAC in terms of throughput, latency, and network utilization. We further propose a QoS-aware SD-MAC to ensure the serviceability of the entire system and to improve the bandwidth utilization. As a major component of simple and compact RF node design, a MAC unit implements the proposed SD-MAC that guarantees correct operation of synchronized frames while keeping overhead low. The synthesis results demonstrate several attractive features such as high speed, low power consumption, nice scalability and low area cost.