Performance assessment of different Network-on-Chip topologies

Multiprocessor System-on-Chip platforms are gaining prominence in the field of SoC design, which accommodates several large heterogeneous semiconductor intellectual property (IP) blocks, integrated onto a single chip. However, there's a crisis of global interconnection with existing bus architectures in such SoC Designs. In response to this crisis, Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an upcoming paradigm, and is becoming the leading contender to replace the conventional bus architectures. Many Network-on-Chip topologies have been proposed in an attempt to tackle various chip architecture needs and routing techniques. In this paper, some of the topologies such as Mesh, Torus, Binary Tree and Butterfly Fat Tree (BFT) have been simulated using a Network Simulator (NS2) and their performances have been assessed and compared taking throughput, maximum end-to-end latency and dropping probability as assessment parameters.