Transaction Specific Virtual Channel Allocation in QoS Supported On-chip Communication

We propose a scheme to reduce the number of virtual channel buffers used to implement logical channels multiplexed across the physical channel in a router output port for QoS supported on-chip communication. The number of virtual channels is minimized during the mapping of tasks to the NoC during the design time of a System on Chip (SoC) and a swarm intelligence-based Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is used. We achieve on average 88% reduction in the number of virtual channels compared to a fixed allocation for the E3S embedded application benchmark suit and a collection of existing real-time embedded applications.