Middleware approaches for adaptivity of Kahn Process Networks on Networks-on-Chip

We investigate and propose a number of different middleware approaches, namely virtual connector, virtual connector with variable rate, and request-driven, which implement the semantics of Kahn Process Networks on Network-on-Chip architectures. All of the presented solutions allow for run-time system adaptivity. We implement the approaches on a Network-on-Chip multiprocessor platform prototyped on an FPGA. Their comparison in terms of the introduced overhead is presented on two case studies with different communication characteristics. We found out that the virtual connector mechanism outperforms other approaches in the communication-intensive application. In the other case study, which has a higher computation/communication ratio, the middleware approaches show similar performance.