An energy- and buffer-aware fully adaptive routing algorithm for Network-on-Chip

Routing algorithms play a significant role in high performance Network-on-Chip which has been widely applied as an efficient communication paradigm for large System-on-Chip. However, existing routing algorithms largely neglect the imbalanced thermal distribution which leads to high temperature nodes. In this paper, an energy- and buffer-aware fully adaptive routing algorithm (EBAR) is proposed to balance the thermal distribution and satisfy the performance requirements. A network state function model, which takes both historical and current states of network into consideration, is constructed to balance the distribution of thermal and alleviate the network congestion. In the meanwhile, a new thermal management scheme is proposed to lower the temperature and satisfy the performance requirements of high priority packets. The simulation results show that EBAR can provide improvement in thermal distribution without performance degradation. The improvements of end-to-end delay and throughput also demonstrate the advantages that can be provided by EBAR.