Run time mapping of adaptive applications onto homogeneous NoC-based reconfigurable architectures

Tile-based NoC architectures have emerged as promising field-programmable hardware architectures which provide arrays of programmable processing units to support run time adaptation. However, efficient real-time support is required for executing adaptive applications which offline design approaches may not provide. In this paper, running dynamic master/slave applications on homogeneous NoC architectures is investigated. Such applications have the characteristic that their program structure may be adapted at run time by inserting or removing tasks to react to changing requirements that are not known a priori. A heuristic is presented for an energy-and performance-aware assignment of dynamically created tasks to the processing units. The provided experimental results give evidence of the benefits of the proposed methods for synthetic test-cases as well as an adaptive image processing application.