Whole packet forwarding: Efficient design of fully adaptive routing algorithms for networks-on-chip

Routing algorithms for networks-on-chip (NoCs) typically only have a small number of virtual channels (VCs) at their disposal. Limited VCs pose several challenges to the design of fully adaptive routing algorithms. First, fully adaptive routing algorithms based on previous deadlock-avoidance theories require a conservative VC re-allocation scheme: a VC can only be re-allocated when it is empty, which limits performance. We propose a novel VC re-allocation scheme, whole packet forwarding (WPF), which allows a non-empty VC to be re-allocated. WPF leverages the observation that the majority of packets in NoCs are short. We prove that WPF does not induce deadlock if the routing algorithm is deadlock-free using conservative VC re-allocation. WPF is an important extension of previous deadlock-avoidance theories. Second, to efficiently utilize WPF in VC-limited networks, we design a novel fully adaptive routing algorithm which maintains packet adaptivity without significant hardware cost. Compared with conservative VC re-allocation, WPF achieves an average 88.9% saturation throughput improvement in synthetic traffic patterns and an average 21.3% and maximal 37.8% speedup for PARSEC applications with heavy network loads. Our design also offers higher performance than several partially adaptive and deterministic routing algorithms.