Hardware design and implementation of a Network-on-Chip based load balancing switch fabric

Network routers rely on an important hardware component, namely the switch fabric, responsible for forwarding incoming packets to their respective output ports according to a scheduling algorithm. A switch fabric mainly consists of buffering memories for temporary queuing and the scheduling unit(s) for forwarding. In this paper, we revisit our previously proposed Network-on-Chip (NOC) based switch fabric architecture and: 1) propose an FPGA based hardware implementation of the NOC switch; 2) carry out performance tests, both via RTL simulations and actual execution on FPGA, under uniform traffic flows; and 3) present results in terms of throughput, average latency, and average bitrate. Our results show that our architecture i) performs as good as other buffering schemes/scheduling algorithms that theoretically achieve 100% throughput, ii) is at least as scalable as other architectures in terms of hardware cost, iii) is perfectly implementable and iv) introduces NOC concepts, which have originally been borrowed from computer networks, back into computer networks.