A fault-tolerant and congestion-aware routing algorithm for Networks-on-Chip

This paper presents a fault-tolerant routing algorithm for mesh-based Networks-on-Chip (NoC) with faulty links. It is a distributed, adaptive and congestion-aware routing algorithm where only two virtual channels are used for both adaptiveness and fault-tolerance. The proposed routing method has a multilevel fault-tolerance capability and therefore it is capable to tolerate more faulty links in more complicated faulty situations with additional hardware costs. The network performance, fault-tolerance capability and hardware overhead are evaluated through appropriate simulations. The experimental results show that the overall reliability of a Network-on-Chip is significantly enhanced against multiple link failures or partially faulty routers with only a small hardware overhead.