Statistical Estimation for Total Communication Load in Application-Specific Network-on-Chip

Network-on-chip design takes optimizing the specific communication requests for target topology as one of its synthesis stages. Instead of finding the optimal result, this paper first addresses the problem of evaluating the various solutions of different algorithms. To obtain such an evaluation, we introduce a statistical approach for approximating the solution space by the observation that all the solution values are Gaussian distributed. An efficient method for calculating the Gaussian parameters with a complexity of O(n⁴) at most is also presented, which is good at solving large scale problems. The superior fidelity of the approximation is validated by real application benchmarks as well as more synthetic ones, with the average error ratio within 7% and even smaller for larger scale problems. Our approach is efficient and creditable which will boost its utility in the promising network-on-chip designs.