Energy and buffer aware application mapping for networks-on-chip with self similar traffic

Networks-on-chip (NoC) is a promising on-chip communication paradigm that improves scalability and performance of System-on-Chips. NoC design flow contains many problems from different areas, such as networking, embedded design and computer architecture. Application mapping is one of these problems, which is generally considered in the form of a communication energy minimization problem. Self similarity is a traffic model that is used to characterize Ethernet and/or wide area network traffic, as well as on-chip network traffic. The present paper tackles the application mapping problem from a networking point of view using self similar traffic assumption and aims to find a mapping solution that improves network performance in terms of buffer utilization while simultaneously minimizing the total communication energy consumption. In this study, by using a self similar on-chip traffic characterization, an application mapping problem definition, which contains both energy and buffer utilization concerns is proposed. In order to solve this intractable problem, a genetic algorithm based solution is derived and implemented. Execution of the algorithm on different test cases has proven that such a mapping formulation avoids high buffer over utilizations while keeping the communication energy requirement still low.