Support efficient and fault-tolerant multicast in bufferless network-on-chip

Abstract

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose three Deflection-Routing-based Multicast (DRM) schemes for a bufferless NoC. The DRM scheme without packets replication (DRM-noPR) sends multicast packet through a non deterministic path. The DRM schemes with adaptive packets replication (DRM-PR-src and DRMYR-all) replicate multicast packets at the source or intermediate node according to the destination position and the state of output ports to reduce the average multicast latency. We also provide fault tolerant supporting in these schemes through a reinforcement learning based method to reconfigure the routing table to tolerate permanent faulty links in the network. Simulation results illustrate that the DRM-PR-all scheme achieves 4l6o, 43cc and 37% less latency on average than that of the DRM-noPR scheme and 27cc, 29cc and 2S6o less latency on average than that of the DRM-PR-src scheme under three synthetic traffic patterns respectively. In addition, all three fault tolerant DRM schemes achieve acceptable performance degradation at various link fault rates without any packet lost. Copyright © 2012 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.