Enhancing Performance of NoC-Based Architectures Using Heuristic Virtual-Channel Sharing Approach

This paper presents a novel virtual-channel (VC) sharing technique for NoC architecture. The proposed architecture improves the utilization of resources to enhance the performance with minimal overheads. A heuristic approach towards the proper VC sharing strategy is proposed, which is performed by an adaptive algorithm that configures the VC sharing based on link load parameters. Architectural design to realize the adaptive VC sharing in generic router is elaborated. The technique can be applied to any NoC architecture, including 3-D NoCs. Extensive quantitative experiments with synthetic and real benchmarks, including an integrated video conference application, demonstrate considerable improvement in area and power efficiency compared to existing VC-based 2D/3D NoC architectures.