An efficient implementation of Hamiltonian path based multicast routing for 3D interconnection networks

In this paper, an efficient multicast partitioning and routing strategy for the 3D NoC-Bus Hybrid mesh architecture is proposed to support multicasting, thereby improving the overall NoC performance and area footprint. The proposed architecture exploits the beneficial attribute of a single-hop (bus-based) interlayer communication of the 3D Stacked mesh architecture to provide high-performance hardware multicast support. To this end, we propose a customized labeling and partitioning method to efficiently split the network into well-balanced subnetworks and enhance the multicast routing function. In addition, we present a Hamiltonian path based multicast routing algorithm which exhibits a high degree of parallelism and reduces the startup latency by generating only two messages for created subnetworks. Our extensive simulations with different traffic profiles show that our architecture using the proposed multicast routing strategy can help to achieve significant performance and area improvements over the the recently proposed 3D NoC architectures offering hardware multicasting.