Fair Packet Scheduling in Network on Chip

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of fairness in packet scheduling within Network on Chip systems, highlighting issues with existing fairness measures and proposing an alternative metric to improve performance and fairness.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new fairness metric for packet scheduling that addresses limitations of the Relative Fairness Bound, enhancing throughput and reducing latency.

Findings

Relative Fairness Bound can decrease throughput

Existing fairness measures may increase latency

Proposed metric improves fairness without performance loss

Abstract

Interconnection networks of parallel systems are used for servicing traf- fic generated by different applications, often belonging to different users. When multiple traffic flows contend for channel bandwidth, the scheduling algorithm regulating the access to that channel plays a key role in ensur- ing that each flow obtains the required quality of service. Fairness is a highly desirable property for a scheduling algorithm. We show that using the Relative Fairness Bound as a fairness measure may lead to decrease in throughput and increase in latency. We propose an alternative metric to evaluate the fairness and avoid the drawback of Relative Fairness Bound.