An admission control system for QoS provision on a best-effort GALS interconnect

A central admission control mechanism is introduced in order to provide effficient Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for different types of application over a best-effort Globally-Asynchronous Locally-Synchronous (GALS) interconnect fabric. The mechanism is applied at the ingress edges of the fabric using tokens to allocate dynamic network resources and prevent network saturation. Analysis and simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the method. The control provides service guarantees on the network while using a modest physical area because of the simplicity of the control logic. This is a cost-effective way to provide QoS in packet-switched interconnect because of its independence from other network components.