MD: Minimal path-based fault-tolerant routing in on-Chip Networks

The communication requirements of many-core embedded systems are convened by the emerging Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm. As on-chip communication reliability is a crucial factor in many-core systems, the NoC paradigm should address the reliability issues. Using fault-tolerant routing algorithms to reroute packets around faulty regions will increase the packet latency and create congestion around the faulty region. On the other hand, the performance of NoC is highly affected by the network congestion. Congestion in the network can increase the delay of packets to route from a source to a destination, so it should be avoided. In this paper, a minimal and defect-resilient (MD) routing algorithm is proposed in order to route packets adaptively through the shortest paths in the presence of a faulty link, as long as a path exists. To avoid congestion, output channels can be adaptively chosen whenever the distance from the current to destination node is greater than one hop along both directions. In addition, an analytical model is presented to evaluate MD for two-faulty cases.