Throughput considerations of fault-tolerant routing in network-on-chip

Abstract

Fault-tolerant routing is the ability to survive beyond the failure of individual components and usually uses several virtual channels (VCs) to pass faulty nodes or links. A well-known wormhole-switched routing algorithm for 2-D mesh interconnection network, f-cube3, uses three virtual channels to pass faulty blocks such as f-ring and f-chain, while only one virtual channel is used when a message does not encounter any fault. One of the key issues in the design of NoCs is the development of an efficient communication system to provide high throughput and low latency interconnection networks. We have evaluated a new fault-tolerant routing algorithm based on f-cube3 as a solution to increase the throughput of physical links more than f-cube3 with lower message delay which uses less number of VCs compared to f-cube3 by reducing required virtual channels to two. Simulation of both f-cube3 and improved algorithm, if-cube2 (improved f-cube2) for the same conditions presented. As the simulation results show, if-cube2 has a higher performance than f-cube3 algorithm even with one less VC. The results also show that our algorithm has less exist packets in network and better performance with 100% traffic load in Network-on-Chip. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.