Abstract: The network-on-chip (NoC) architecture is a main factor affecting the system performance of complicated multiprocessor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs). To evaluate the effects of the NoC architectures on communication efficiency, several kinds of techniques have been developed, including various simulators and analytical models. The simulators are accurate but time consuming, especially in large space explorations of diverse network configurations; in contrast, the analytical models are fast and flexible, providing alternative methods for performance evaluation. In this paper, we propose a general analytical model to estimate the communication performance for arbitrary NoCs with wormhole routing and virtual channel flow control. To resolve the inherent dependency of successive links occupied by one packet in wormhole routing, we propose the routing path decomposition approach to generating a series of ordered link categories. Then we use the traditional queuing system to derive the fine-grained transmission latency for each network component. According to our experiments, the proposed analytical model provides a good approximation of the average packet latency to the simulation results, and estimates the network throughput precisely under various NoC configurations and workloads. Also, the analytical model runs about 10⁵ times faster than the cycle-accurate NoC simulator. Practical applications of the model including bottleneck detection and virtual channel allocation are also presented.

Key words: Analytical model, Communication performance, Network-on-chip (NoC), Queuing system, Routing path decomposition, Virtual channel

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