Low-latency and Energy-efficient Monitoring Interconnect for Hierarchical-agent-monitored NoCs

This paper presents quantitative analysis of monitoring interconnect architecture alternatives in hierarchical agent-based NoC platform. Hierarchical monitoring design methodology provides scalable dynamic management services with agents monitoring different levels. To enable low-latency and low-energy agent communication, we examined three interconnect alternatives: TDM-based virtual channeling, unified dedicated monitoring network, and separate dedicated monitoring networks. With Orion and Cadence simulators, we estimated the energy and latency of monitoring communications on the three architectures for an 8*8 mesh network in 65 nm technology. The results suggest that separate dedicate links mostly minimize the communication delay and energy consumption (66.7% and 82.1% respectively compared to TDM-based interconnect), while incurring moderate area penalty.