Implementing On-Chip Wireless Communication in Multi-stage Interconnection NoCs

Abstract

Current MultiProcessor System-on-Chips exploit the Network-on-Chip (NoC) design paradigm as a viable solution to get an efficient and scalable communication backbone. As the number of integrated cores keeps growing, alternatives to the multi-hop nature of NoCs like Wireless Networks-on-Chip (WiNoCs) have been proposed to provide a subset of network nodes with a wireless interface that enables long-range communications in a single hop. In this work, we propose the use of on-chip wireless communication on Multi-stage Interconnection Networks (MINs) based NoCs. After extending the well-known Noxim platform to support Wireless MINs architectures, we perform an extensive set of cycle-level estimation demonstrating that, while traditionally used in high-performance parallel computing, wireless-augmented MINs represent a very promising candidate for the applicability of on-chip radio communications technologies, with a noticeable improvement in both average delay and saturation point, at the cost of an estimated energy overhead ranging from 2.8 up to 18.4 in the case of 128 core nodes.