An Effective Multicast Mechanism in On-chip Networks

With the evolution of applications, the on-chip networks need to support one-to-many (multicast) communication efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new multicast mechanism, called multi-cycle (MC), for on-chip networks. MC mechanism takes reliable communication into explicit consideration. More precisely, in MC, in order to avoid the sending of |k| separate acknowledgement packets, the node which is the last destination of the multicast packet sends back the multicast packet to the source node on receipt of the packet. In addition, a recovery approach, instead of avoidance, is developed to deal with the deadlock issue caused by the simultaneous transmission of multicast packets. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed MC mechanism compared to both the tree-based and path-based multicast methods.