Dimensional Bubble Flow Control and Fully Adaptive Routing in the 2-D Mesh Network on Chip

In this paper, the novel flow control strategy called dimensional bubble flow control (DBFC) is presented. The flow control strategy of DBFC builds on virtual cut-through switching and credit-based flow control mechanism and analyzes the credit value of port and the routing information of the packets to realize the point-point flow control. In the 2-D mesh network on chip, when the flow control strategy of DBFC is accepted, the adaptive dimensional bubble routing (ADBR) algorithm designed in this paper can get the goals including deadlock-free and minimal distance even if the cyclic dependencies exist. In this paper, the detail proof is provided for these conclusions. Lastly, we adapt the source code of NOXIM that is a popular simulator of on-chip networks and realize the flow control of DBFC and ADBR algorithm in NOXIM. We test the performance of ADBR on NOXIM. The simulation performance shows our scheme is superior to the usual approach such as XY dimension-order routing, with nearly 17.5% improvement in the packets latency and throughput.