Minimizing the system impact of router faults by means of reconfiguration and adaptive routing

To tolerate faults in Networks-on-Chip (NoC), routers are often disconnected from the NoC, which affects the system integrity. This is because cores connected to the disabled routers cannot be accessed from the network, resulting in loss of function and performance. We propose E-Rescuer, a technique offering a reconfigurable router architecture and a fault-tolerant routing algorithm. By taking advantage of bypassing channels, the reconfigurable router architecture maintains the connection between the cores and the network regardless of the router status. The routing algorithm allows the core to access the network when the local router is disabled.Our analysis and experiments show that the proposed technique provides 100% packet delivery in 100%, 92.56%, and 83.25% of patterns when 1, 2 and 3 routers are faulty, respectively. Moreover, the throughput increases up to 80%, 46% and 33% in comparison with FTLR, HiPFaR, and CoreRescuer, respectively.