Dynamic Control for Mixed-Critical Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) for future real-time systems must provide service guarantees for applications with different levels of criticality. In this work, we propose an efficient mechanism for supporting mixed-criticality which combines the global, work-conserving scheduling for the end to end guarantees with the local arbitration in routers. We introduce a dynamic control layer with a central Resource Manager (RM) synchronizing transmissions with a dedicated protocol. The proposed mechanism allows to improve over existing solutions through reducing hardware overhead compared to non-blocking routers with rate control as well as temporal overhead compared to Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM). By using formal analysis, we show that RMs provide efficient service guarantees to all synchronized applications. We validate experimentally, using benchmarks, these guarantees along with the performance of the mechanism and induced overhead.