ICARO: Congestion isolation in networks-on-chip

The growing demand of computing power and the emerging trend towards heterogeneity lead to integrate more and more cores and specialized modules into a single chip. As the number of cores per chip increases, the network interconnecting them must satisfy the growing communication needs. However, several factors as aggressive traffic patterns, power-saving and fault-tolerance mechanisms may lead to oversubscribed resources in the network, thereby generating congestion and so degrading the overall network performance. In this paper we propose ICARO, a mechanism to dynamically isolate the traffic flows contributing to congestion making use of dedicated virtual networks. In this way, ICARO prevents the head-of-line blocking effect derived from congestion, thereby improving overall network performance. We analyze thoroughly our proposal, especially from the robustness point of view, showing that it effectively manages to identify and isolate congested flows, improving network performance up to 82% with respect to previous proposals.