A generic adaptive path-based routing method for MPSoCs

Several unicast routing protocols have been presented for unicast traffic in MPSoCs. Exploiting the unicast routing algorithms for multicast traffic increases the likelihood of deadlock and congestion. In order to avoid deadlock for multicast traffic, the Hamiltonian path strategy was introduced. The traditional Hamiltonian path routing protocols supporting both unicast and multicast traffic are based on deterministic models, leading to lower performance. In this paper, we propose an adaptive routing protocol for both unicast and multicast traffic without using virtual channels. The proposed method maximizes the degree of adaptiveness of the routing functions which are based on the Hamiltonian path while guaranteeing deadlock freedom. Furthermore, both unicast and multicast aspects of the presented method have been widely investigated separately. Results obtained in both synthetic and real traffic models show that the proposed adaptive method for multicast and unicast aspects has lower latency and power dissipation compared to previously proposed path-based multicasting algorithms with negligible hardware overhead.