Distributed Traffic Monitoring Methods for Adaptive Network-on-Chip

A significant part of intelligent NoC structures is a network monitoring service which makes possible to observe the status of the network and adapt routing based on it. Two monitoring methods are presented and compared in this paper. These distributed network monitoring methods are based on monitoring the status of the routers and the status of the FIFO buffers between the routers. The router status based monitoring spreads the switching activity information indirectly over the network while the FIFO status based monitoring observes FIFOs on the potential routing directions. The distributed monitoring methods make possible to spread the traffic over the network and use the network resources efficiently and reliably. The results show that the best throughput is reached using the FIFO status based monitoring while there is no significant differences on packet latencies.