Performance Evaluation of Multi-Channel for 10×10 Mesh Wireless Network-on-Chip Architecture

Abstract

Wireless Network-on-Chip (NoC) is envisioned as complementary to the conventional NoC due to its CMOS compatibility and architectural flexibility, which is advantageous as no wiring infrastructure is required for wireless transmission. On-chip wireless channels are used to actually minimize the communication latency between the distant processing cores because of its ability to communicate with long-distance communication processing cores in a single-hop. This paper investigates the effect of the single-, dual-, and triple-channels on the mesh-WiNoC architecture. Additionally, four and nine radio hubs are evenly distributed throughout the mesh-WiNoC topological structure to evaluate its global transmission latency, network throughput, and energy characteristics. The investigated architectures under test are simulated on the cycle-accurate systemC based Noxim simulator under a random traffic workload scenario for WiNoC performance evaluation. This study’s contribution is that it looks into the best number of wireless channels to use in a 10 × 10 mesh WiNoC architecture for 4 and 9 radio hub scenarios to get the best performance in transmission latency and energy consumption. Experimental results show that for both investigated number of radio hub on mesh-WiNoC architecture demonstrates nearly identical system performance in terms of transmission latency and throughput. However, the meshWiNoC architecture with 4 radio hub demonstrates better energy characteristics, saving 9.63% and 13.60% of energy, respectively, when compared to the architecture with 6 and 9 radio hub.