Enhancing Performance Sustainability of Fault Tolerant Routing Algorithms in NoC-Based Architectures

Reliability of embedded systems and devices is becoming a challenge with technology scaling. To deal with the reliability issues, fault tolerant solutions are needed. The design paradigm for future System-on-Chip (SoC) implementation is Network-on-Chip (NoC). Fault tolerance in NoC can be achieved at many abstraction levels. Many fault tolerant architectures and routing algorithms have already been proposed for NoC but the utilization of resources, affected indirectly by faults is yet to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a NoC architecture, which sustains the overall system performance by utilizing resources, which cannot be used by other architectures under faults. An approach towards a proper virtual-channel (VC) sharing strategy is proposed, based on communication bandwidth requirements. The technique can be applied to any NoC architecture, including 3-D NoCs. Extensive quantitative experiments with synthetic benchmarks, including uniform, transpose and negative exponential distribution (NED), demonstrate considerable improvement in terms of performance sustainability under faulty conditions compared to existing VC-based NoC architectures.