Abstract: As the number of cores in a multicore system increases, the communication pressure on the interconnection network also increases. The network-on-chip (NoC) architecture is expected to take on the ever-expanding communication demands triggered by the ever-increasing number of cores. The communication behavior of the NoC architecture exhibits significant spatial–temporal variation, posing a considerable challenge for NoC reconfiguration. In this paper, we propose a traffic-oriented reconfigurable NoC with augmented inter-port buffer sharing to adapt to the varying traffic flows with a high flexibility. First, a modified input port is introduced to support buffer sharing between adjacent ports. Specifically, the modified input port can be dynamically reconfigured to react to on-demand traffic. Second, it is ascertained that a centralized output-oriented buffer management works well with the reconfigurable input ports. Finally, this reconfiguration method can be implemented with a low overhead hardware design without imposing a great burden on the system implementation. The experimental results show that compared to other proposals, the proposed NoC architecture can greatly reduce the packet latency and improve the saturation throughput, without incurring significant area and power overhead.

Key words: Network-on-chip; Reconfigurable; Traffic-oriented; Buffer sharing

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