QaMC - QoS Aware Multicast router for NoC fabric

Collective communication support which has been playing a major role in network on chips (NoCs) is used for image processing, multimedia and other signal processing applications. Application Specific NoC utilizes multicasting (MC) and other services like reduction and scattering for parallel data processing. The proposed architecture introduces a new network model, wherein few extra network nodes named QaMC (Quality of Service Aware Multicast) routers have to be added to improve multicasting by providing a direct link to each individual router of the MC groups. It utilizes the concept of application mapping for the formation of MC groups. It also provides a circuit switched model of communication for unicasting through these direct links along with the normal unicasting without the usage of extra buffers. The direct link communication can also be utilized for Guaranteed Services (GSs), which is an added advantage. The proposed architecture along with QaMC routing algorithm enables efficient multicasting as well as guaranteed services in application specific NoCs. An efficient routing algorithm has also been proposed for the convenient flow of multicast packets as well as providing GS. The area overhead for the complete 4×4 mesh network obtained is of about 4.2 % which is comparably negligible and the concept can also be extended to 3D NoCs.