Network-on-chip with an arbitration control for balancing throughputs in multiprocessor applications

This paper presents an arbitration mechanism to balance bandwidth consumption or data throughputs between packets in a network-on-chip (NoC) with ID-based wormhole cut-through switching method. When data traffic flowing through a network communication link is high, the bandwidth space of the link, which is comsumed by a message or a data stream, could be affected by the distance between the source node, from which the message is injected, and the hotspot node. Without considering the number of stream flows from different input ports, a simple arbitration control such as round-robin arbitration cannot balance throughput between the streams. This paper proposes an arbitration control strategy capable of assigning bandwidth or data rate fairly between the data streams. The fair arbitration mechanism is enabled by which the arbiter units detect active requests from input ports and the number of the streams flowing from the input ports of the routers. By using the arbitration mechanism, a stream coming far from a hotspot node, can share bandwidths fairly with other streams nearby the the hotspot node.