Hardware-assisted Decentralized Resource Management for Networks on Chip with QoS

Networks-on-Chip have shown their scalability for future many-core systems on chip. In real world scenarios, concurrent applications with different QoS requirements affect each other through overlapping communication. Therefore computation resources may not be efficiently utilized because the required communication resources are already occupied. Hence, an efficient resource management strategy is required that ensures fair sharing of communication resources between applications. Decentralized strategies provide better scalability in many-core systems. In this paper, we propose a hardware supported decentralized NoC resource management strategy. Our concept enables to define NoC regions through decentralized reconfigurable resource management policies. It offers improved performance and communication resource allocation within the regions. The proposed concept is investigated through simulation of real world application scenarios. The simulation results highlight the performance benefit within the region and the increased probability for successful reservation of communication resources. Implementation results show the low area overhead of the proposed hardware support.