A tighter recursive calculus to compute the worst case traversal time of real-time traffic over NoCs

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a communication subsystem which has been widely utilized in many-core processors and system-on-chips in general. In this paper, we focus on a Round-Robin Arbitration (RRA) based wormhole-switched NoC which is a common architecture used in most of the existing implementations. In order to execute real-time applications on such a NoC based platform, a number of given real-time requirements need to be fulfilled. One of the most typical requirements is schedulability which refers to determining if real-time packets can be delivered within the given time durations. Timing analysis is a common tool to verify the schedulability of a real-time system. Unfortunately, the existing timing analyses of RRA-based NoCs either provide too pessimistic estimates which results in overly allocated resources or require a large amount of processing which limits the applicability in reality. Therefore, in this paper, we present an improved timing analysis, aiming to provide more accurate estimates along with acceptable computation time. From the evaluation results, we can clearly observe the improvement achieved by the proposed timing analysis.