An Adaptive Routing Scheme Based on Q-learning and Real-time Traffic Monitoring for Network-on-Chip

In the Network on Chip (NoC), performance optimization has always been a research focus. Compared with the static routing scheme, dynamical routing schemes can better reduce the data of packet transmission latency under network congestion. In this paper, we propose a dynamical Q-learning routing approach with real-time monitoring of NoC. Firstly, we design a real-time monitoring scheme and the corresponding circuits to record the status of traffic congestion for NoC. Secondly, we propose a novel method of Q-learning. This method finds an optimal path based on the lowest traffic congestion. Finally, we dynamically redistribute network tasks to increase the packet transmission speed and balance the traffic load. Compared with the C-XY routing and DyXY routing, our method achieved improvement in terms of 25.6%-49.5% and 22.9%-43.8%.