Power-aware selection policy for networks on chip

The selection policy of an adaptive routing algorithm plays an important role on both performance and power figures of a network on chip (NoC). In this paper we propose a new selection policy which is power-aware. The basic idea is taking into account not only a performance metric but also a power metric related to both self and coupling switching activity of the selected output link. The experimental analysis, carried out on both synthetic and real traffic scenarios, shows important power and energy savings (up to 30% and 27% respectively) with a negligible impact on performance.