Position Paper: Towards Hardware-Assisted Decentralized Mapping of Applications for Heterogeneous NoC Architectures

NoC-based many-core architectures are becoming more and more mainstream. To use such platforms efficiently, it is crucial to map applications onto these architectures while considering the communication demands and the actual load of the NoC architecture. Therefore, this paper proposes a concept for a hardware-based mapping mechanism for applications onto NoC-based architectures. We propose an entire flow from the application graph to the hardware module. We give a notion of: (a) task graph pre-processing, (b) the serialization of the task graph, (c) a protocol for the mapping and (d) dedicated hardware modules inside the routers. In addition, we show potentials of our proposed distributed hardware mapping approach.