PT-BAR: Prioritized Thermo-Buffer Based Adaptive Routing Protocol for Network-on-chip

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an important technology that replaced the traditional bus-based architecture for the future of System-on-Chip (SoC). The NoC system provides better scalability, performance, reliability, etc. to the SoC networks by implementing the principles of interconnection networks and packet switching. One of the major problems in NoC is the increase in temperature of the nodes that leads to unbalanced thermal management within the network. This further leads to performance degradation due to damaged nodes. A novel thermal management scheme is proposed in this paper, which makes use of the thermal state and buffer state of the nodes for routing the packets. The proposed Prioritized Thermo-Buffer based Adaptive Routing (PT-BAR) protocol maintains a thermal region based on the thermal balance of the nodes within the region. Only high priority packets are transferred through the thermal region to preserve thermal balance throughout the network. During packet transfers the thermo-buffer model considers the energy consumption and thermal conductivity of nodes to calculate temperature and the current buffer state of the node. This factor is used to choose a path that will provide better performance in end-to-end delay and throughput while preserving the thermal balance of the network. Proposed PT-BAR reduces the temperature by 1.5° C than the existing protocol by making use of the efficient thermal model and buffer models for the efficient routing strategy.