Introducing NoC2: Interconnecting NoC-based Systems through Ethernet

In this paper, we investigate the case of inter-NoC communication between a network of NoC-based systems. We introduce NoC2, an NoC-based system with an Ethernet communication manager that provides better management for inter-NoC traffic. Current implementations of inter-NoC traffic management handle inter-NoC traffic using software running on top of a dedicated PE, whereas NoC2 is designed so that the software running on cores within the NoC is completely abstracted from inter-NoC traffic management. Experiments show that this kind of abstraction has better inter-NoC communication performance over generic NoC interfaced via Ethernet. Results suggest that NoC2 would perform better when it comes to scaling NoC-based systems by interfacing more NoC-based hardware.