Study on Network-on-Chip Router Buffer Utilization

Abstract

Since Network-on-Chip (NoC) is proposed to act as the communication infrastructure for many-core architecture, it has become one of the most investigated research topics. The term “saturation†is always used while discussing about performance and power figures exhibited by a NoC. Router buffer utilization is one of the key factors to understand network saturation status. In this paper, we carry out detail study on the router buffer utilization under various traffic load. According to our study, the network packets are classified into three types: destination packets, passing packets, and deterring packets. These packets will make different contribution to the router buffer occupation.