ACO-based fault-aware routing algorithm for Network-on-Chip systems

With the shrinking size of circuits and the scaling of Network-on-Chip (NoC), the on-chip components will have a higher chance to fail. The on-chip failures can cause traffic congestion and even system crash. To overcome this problem, the NoC routing algorithm should be implemented with fault-tolerant capability. Inspired by the fault-tolerant behavior of ant colony consisting of three steps: Encounter, Search, and Select, we propose Ant Colony Optimization-based Fault-aware Routing (ACO-FAR) algorithm for traffic balancing. To effectively forward the packets to a non-faulty region, three mechanisms of ACO-FAR correspond to the three-step behaviors of ants are proposed in this work. The simulation results show that proposed ACO-FAR has higher throughput than related works by 12.5%-77.7%. Also, this routing method improves the reachable packet ratio to 99.50%-99.98% and the distribution of traffic load in the faulty network.