Using segmentation to improve schedulability of real-time traffic over RRA-based NoCs

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the interconnect of choice for many-core processors and system-on-chips in general. Most of the existing NoC designs focus on the performance with respect to average throughput, which makes them less applicable for real-time applications especially when applications have hard timing requirements on the worst-case scenarios. In this paper, we focus on a Round-Robin Arbitration (RRA) based wormhole-switched NoC which is a common architecture used in most of the existing implementations. We propose a novel segmentation algorithm targeting RRA-based NoCs in order to improve the schedulability of real-time traffic without modifying the hardware architecture. According to the evaluation results, the proposed segmentation solution can significantly improve the schedulability of the whole network.