Communication modeling of multicast in all-port wormhole-routed NoCs

Multicast is one of the most frequently used collective communication operations in multi-core SoC platforms. Bus as the traditional interconnect architecture for SoC development has been highly efficient in delivering multicast messages. Since the bus is non-scalable, it can not address the bandwidth requirements of the large SoCs. The networks on-chip (NoCs) emerged as a scalable alternative to address the increasing communication demands of such systems. However, due to its hop-to-hop communication, the NoCs may not be able to deliver multicast operations as efficiently as buses do. Adopting multi-port routers has been an approach to improve the performance of the multicast operations in interconnection networks. This paper presents a novel analytical model to compute communication latency of the multicast operation in wormhole-routed interconnection networks employing asynchronous multi-port routers scheme. The model is applied to the Quarc NoC and its validity is verified by comparing the model predictions against the results obtained from a discrete-event simulator developed using OMNET++.