Dynamic admission control for real-time networks-on-chips

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) for real-time systems require solutions for safe and predictable sharing of network resources between transmissions with different quality-of service requirementrs. In this work, we present a mechanism for a global and dynamic admission control in NoCs designed for realtime systems. It introduces an overlay network to synchronize transmissions using arbitration units called Resource Managers (RMs), which allows a global and work-conserving scheduling. We present a formal worst-case timing analysis for the proposed mechanism and demonstrate that this solution not only exposes higher performance in simulation but, even more importantly, consistently reaches smaller formally guaranteed worst-case latencies than TDM for realistic levels of system's utilization. Our mechanism does not require modification of routers and therefore can be used together with any architecture utilizing non-blocking routers.