ParRouting: An Efficient Area Partition-Based Congestion-Aware Routing Algorithm for NoCs

Abstract

Routing algorithms is a key factor that determines the performance of NoC (Networks-on-Chip) systems. Regional congestion awareness routing algorithms have shown great potential in improving the performance of NoC. However, it incurs a significant queuing latency when practitioners use existing regional congestion awareness routing algorithms to make routing decisions, thus degrading the performance of NoC. In this paper, we propose an efficient area partition-based congestion-aware routing algorithm, ParRouting, which aims at increasing the throughput and reducing the latency for NoC systems. First, ParRouting partitions the network into two areas (i.e., edge area and central area.) based on node priorities. Then, for the edge area, ParRouting selects the output node based on different priorities for higher throughput; for the central area, ParRouting selects the node in the low congestion direction as the output node for lower queuing latency. Our experimental results indicate that ParRouting achieves a 53.4% reduction in packet average latency over SPLASH -2 ocean application and improves the saturated throughput by up to 38.81% over a synthetic traffic pattern for an NoC system, compared to existing routing algorithms.