Slack-based resource arbitration for real-time Networks-on-Chip

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) designed for real-time systems must efficiently deal with a broad diversity of traffic requirements. This requires providing latency guarantees for hard real-time transmissions with minimum impact on performance sensitive best-effort traffic. In this work, we present a novel mechanism which achieves this goal through a slack-based global and dynamic prioritization of data streams. This is performed using an overlay network and a scheduling unit combining local arbitration performed in routers with global scheduling of entire logical transmissions for end to end guarantees. Consequently, our approach allows to decrease both hardware and temporal overhead when compared with existing solutions and to achieve a performance improvement up to around 60%.