Mapping Embedded Systems onto NoCs - The Traffic Effect on Dynamic Energy Estimation

This work addresses the problem of application mapping in networks-on-chip (NoCs). It explores the importance of characterizing network traffic to effectively predict NoC energy consumption. Traffic is seen as an important factor affecting the problem of mapping applications into NoCs having as goal to minimize the total dynamic energy consumption of a complex system-on-a-chip (SoC). Experiments showed that failing to consider the bit transitions influence on traffic inevitably leads to an energy estimation error. This error is proportional to the amount of bit transitions in transmitted packets. In applications that present a large number of packets exchange, the error is propagated, significantly affecting the mapping results. This paper proposes a high-level application model that captures the traffic effect and uses it to describe the behavior of applications. In order to evaluate the quality of the proposed model, a set of embedded systems were described using both, a previously proposed model (that does not capture the traffic effect), and the model proposed here. Comparing the resulting mappings, those derived from the proposed model showed improvements in energy savings with regard to the other model for all experiments