High Performance Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for NoC-Based Many-Core Systems

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) has become a promising approach for the on-chip communication infrastructure of many-core Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). Faults may occur in the NoC both at the router and link level. There are many fault-tolerant approaches presented both in the off-chip and on-chip networks. Some approaches disable some healthy components in order to form a specific shape and others not. Regardless of all varieties, there has always been a common assumption among them. Most of all traditional fault-tolerant methods are based on rerouting packets around a faulty node or region. These approaches affect the performance significantly not only by taking longer paths but also by creating hotspot around a fault. The focus of this paper is to maintain the performance of NoC in the presence of faults. The presented method takes advantage of a fully adaptive routing algorithm using one and two virtual channels along the X and Y dimensions. This method is able to tolerate all cases of one-faulty node without losing the performance of NoC. According to the experimental results, this presented fault-tolerant routing algorithm is able to support up to six faulty nodes in the 8×8 mesh network by up to 98% reliability.