An Enhanced Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Mesh Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Fault-tolerant routing is the ability to survive failure of individual components and usually uses several virtual channels (VCs) to overcome faulty nodes or links. A well-known wormhole-switched routing algorithm for 2-D mesh interconnection network called f-cube3 uses three virtual channels to pass faulty regions, while only one virtual channel is used when a message does not encounter any fault. One of the integral stages of designing Network-on-Chips (NoCs) is the development of an efficient communication system in order to provide low latency networks. We have proposed a new fault-tolerant routing algorithm based on f-cube3 as a solution to reduce the delay of network packets which uses less number of VCs in comparison with f-cube3. Moreover, in this method we have improved the use of VCs per each physical link by reducing required channels to two. Furthermore, simulations of both f-cube3 and our algorithm based on same conditions have been presented.