Dynamic Flow Regulation for IP Integration on Network-on-Chip

Abstract

Flow regulation is a traffic shaping technique, which can be used to achieve communication performance guarantees with low buffering cost when integrating IPs to network-on-chip architectures. This paper presents dynamic flow regulation, which overcomes the rigidity of static flow regulation that pre-configures regulation parameters statically and only once. The dynamic regulation is made possible by employing a sliding window based online flow ($\sigma$, $\rho$) characterization technique, where $\sigma$ bounds traffic burstiness and $\rho$ reflects the average rate. The characterization method is effective and can be implemented in hardware with small area and high speed. The resulting dynamic regulation can adaptively adjust the traffic regulation strength in response to real traffic workload scenarios. As such, it makes more efficient use of the system interconnect resources, leading to significant improvement in network performance.