Design of an on-line configurable traffic generator for NoC

Performance evaluation for Network on Chip (NoC) is still a challenging problem. This paper presents the design of an on-line configurable traffic generator (OCTG) that provides a fast and effective traffic generation environment for evaluating the communication performance of Network-on-Chip (NoC). The novelty of the proposed OCTG architecture lies in the fact that it is different from just having some configurable parameters as the conventional design in order to improve its flexibility but it holds out on-line configuration. Parameters are transferred to the configuration engine through JTAG interface, then the configuration engine creates configuration signals to OCTGs to perform online configuration. The OCTG comprises two traffic modes: broadcast transmission (BT) and node to node transmission (NTNT). The OCTG can restart communication immediately without any other operations after completing configuration even when the communication transaction is running. Some communication traffic modes can be exactly emulated by the OCTG, so we can evaluate the NoC communication architecture in different traffic modes or compare the NoC performance with different architectures. Experiments showed that NoC performance with the same architecture in NTNT (node (i, j) to node (j, i)) is better than that in BT. And the XY routing is better than that with odd_even router in BT when the injection rate is more than 0.2. But when the injection rate is less than 0.2, the later is better than the former only in average packet latency.