Bi-Objective Cost Function for Adaptive Routing in Network-on-Chip

Abstract

This paper proposes a new fully adaptive routing protocol for 2D-mesh Network-on-Chip (NoCs). It is inspired from the A-star search algorithm and called Heuristic based Routing Algorithm (HRA). It is distributed, congestion-aware, and fault-tolerant by using only the local information of each router neighbors. HRA does not use Virtual Channels (VCs) but tries to reduce the risk of deadlock by avoiding the 2-nodes and the 4-nodes loops. HRA is based on a bi-objective weighted sum cost function. Its goal is optimizing latency and throughput. Experiments show that HRA ensures a good reliability rate despite the presence of many faulty links. In addition, our approach reports interesting latencies and average throughput values when a non-dominated solution is chosen.