Real-Time Guarantees in Routerless Networks-on-Chip

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytical framework for providing latency guarantees in routerless networks-on-chip, enabling real-time communication in multiprocessor systems and comparing their performance to traditional router-based networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel analytical method to compute latency bounds in routerless networks-on-chip for real-time systems, which was not previously available.

Findings

Routerless networks can meet real-time latency guarantees under certain conditions.

The proposed framework effectively compares routerless and traditional networks.

Routerless networks show promising performance for real-time multiprocessor communication.

Abstract

This paper considers the use of routerless networks-on-chip as an alternative on-chip interconnect for multiprocessor systems requiring hard real-time guarantees for inter-processor communication. It presents a novel analytical framework that can provide latency upper bounds to real-time packet flows sent over routerless networks-on-chip, and it uses that framework to evaluate the ability of such networks to provide real-time guarantees. Extensive comparative analysis is provided, considering different architectures for routerless networks and a state-of-the-art wormhole network based on priority-preemptive routers as a baseline.