Scalability-oriented multicast traffic characterization

Multicast on-chip communications are expected to become an important concern as the number of cores grows and we reach the manycore era. The increasing importance such traffic flows directly contrasts with the diminishing multicast performance of current Network-on-Chip (NoC) designs, and has lead to a surge of research works that seek to improve on-chip multicast support. Within this context, one-to-many traffic models may become useful for the early-stage design and evaluation of these proposals. However, existing models do not distinguish between unicast and multicast flows and often do not consider different multiprocessor sizes. To bridge this gap, a multicast scalability analysis is presented, aiming to provide tools for the modeling of multicast communications for NoC design and evaluation purposes.