High performance in Network-on-Chip using efficient routing

The performance of Network-on-Chip largely depends on the underlying routing techniques, which have two constituencies: output selection and input selection. Previous research on routing techniques for Network on chip has focused on the improvement of output selection. This paper investigates the impact of input selection, and presents a novel contention-aware input selection technique for network on chip that improves the routing efficiency. When there are contentions of multiple input channels competing for the same output channel, Contention-aware input selection decides which input channel obtains the access depending on the contention level of the upstream switches, which inturn removes possible network congestion. Simulation results with different synthetic and real-life traffic patterns show that, when combined with either deterministic or adaptive output selection, Contention -aware input selection achieves significant better performance than the traditional first-come-first-served input selection, with low hardware overhead.