Packet-based Adaptive Virtual Channel Configuration for NoC Systems

Growing number of on-chip cores requires the introduction of an efficient communication structure such as NoC. In NoC design, the channel buffer organization facilitates the use of Virtual Channels (VC) for on-chip communication. A VC structure can be categorized as static or dynamic. In a dynamic VC structure, variable number of buffer-slots can be employed by each VC according to different traffic conditions in the NoC. We introduce a Packet-Based Virtual Channel (PBVC) scheme, where a VC is reserved when a packet enters the router and released when the packet leaves. A VC will hold the flits of only one packet at a time that subsequently removes the Head-of-Line blocking. PBVC technique is an amended version of dynamically allocated multi-queue schemes where, an input or output port employs a centralized buffer whose slots are dynamically allocated to VCs. The experimental results show that our approach improves network latency and throughput as compared to other VC designs.