Managing QoS flows at task level in NoC-based MPSoCs

The use of NoCs in complex MPSoCs is a reality in academic researches and industrial designs. A lot of research effort has been conducted in the last years in NoC and MPSoC designs, but few works address the gap between the NoC infrastructure and the MPSoC software applications. An important issue in MPSoC design is QoS, since applications running in such systems may have tight timing constraints, as video processing or fast communication protocols. This work bridges the hardware/software gap, exploring the integration of low-level NoC services into an application programming interface (API). Such API hides the interconnection complexity from programmer and provides efficient design space exploration to meet the QoS application requirements. Results shows that, even with the huge available bandwidth offered by NoCs, such interconnection architecture is not capable to meet QoS constraints when flows compete for common resources inside the NoC. Using the priority scheme developed in this work, applications executing in the MPSoC achieve the performance requirements. This work highlights the need to integrate NoC and MPSoC design efforts in a unified framework.