A Low-Overhead, Fully-Distributed, Guaranteed-Delivery Routing Algorithm for Faulty Network-on-Chips

This paper introduces a new, practical routing algorithm, Mazerouting, to tolerate faults in network-on-chips. The algorithm is the first to provide all of the following properties at the same time: 1) fully-distributed with no centralized component, 2) guaranteed delivery (it guarantees to deliver packets when a path exists between nodes, or otherwise indicate that destination is unreachable, while being deadlock and livelock free), 3) low area cost, 4) low reconfiguration overhead upon a fault. To achieve all these properties, we propose Maze-routing, a new variant of face routing in on-chip networks and make use of deflections in routing. Our evaluations show that Maze-routing has 16X less area overhead than other algorithms that provide guaranteed delivery. Our Maze-routing algorithm is also high performance: for example, when up to 5 links are broken, it provides 50% higher saturation throughput compared to the state-of-the-art. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.4 [Computer...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: NOCS
• Authors: Mohammad Fattah, Antti Airola, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Nima Mirzaei, Pasi Liljeberg, Juha Plosila, Siamak Mohammadi, Tapio Pahikkala, Onur Mutlu, Hannu Tenhunen
• Keywords: Computer Networks, NOCS 2015