Application-driven dynamic bandwidth allocation for two-layer network-on-chip design

•A table-based algorithm is proposed for identifying the heavy-load flows at runtime.•A reconfigurable network is used in the proposed NoC for setting up P2P connections.•P2P connections can be dynamically constructed according to the network traffic.•An application-driven dynamic bandwidth allocation for multi-layer NoCs is proposed.

Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture has been widely used in many multi-core system designs. To improve the communication efficiency and the bandwidth utilization of NoC for various applications, we firstly propose a table-based algorithm for identifying the dominant flows at runtime. Then a two-layer NoC architecture with an application-driven bandwidth allocation scheme is presented, which is capable of identifying heavy-load dataflows and dynamically reconfiguring point-to-point (P2P) connections to optimize the heavy-load traffic. Experimental results reveal that our design (8 × 8 mesh NoC) achieves 28.5% performance improvement and 25.9% power consumption saving compared to the baseline NoC.

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