An investigation of the impact of network parameters on performance of network-on-chips

Communication-centric designs such as network-on-chip (NoC) have been shown to have significant potential in overcoming the problems of increased wire delay and delay variations in deep submicron global interconnect. To further enhance performance, the design parameters of the NoC should be chosen based on the application. In this paper, we identify these parameters and investigate their impact on the NoC system performance. For this purpose, we classified NoC applications into three broad categories, based on the traffic pattern in the network, and simulations were performed with different combinations of the network parameters for each application. We present detailed analysis of this comparative study, which could help system designers in making appropriate choices for the different network parameters in designing an NoC for a particular application.