An equilibrium partitioning method for multicast traffic in 3D NoC architecture

Recently, three-dimensional Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) has been a promising transmission architecture for the communication requirement in Multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) due to its capability of providing better scalability and higher throughput. The mode of information transmission in the network has significant impact on the overall system performance. Multicast routing can take advantage of the inherent parallelization offered by the MPSoCs to communicate the messages efficiently. However, the transmission latency is a bottleneck that has become a barrier to improve the performance. In this paper, to reduce the total transmission latency in the network, we propose an equilibrium partitioning method, which can obtain a tradeoff between the startup latency and the network latency to reduce the total transmission latency. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the average latency by 18.3% at most than the previous recursive partitioning (RP) method, when the architecture is 16× 16× 3 mesh and the packet size is 15 flits. In addition, the scalability of the equilibrium partitioning method is better than the contrastive method.