Improved Flow Control for Minimal Fully Adaptive Routing in 2D Mesh NoC

Routing algorithm has a significant impact on the overall performance of network-on-chip (NoC) based system due to the unbalanced nature of NoC traffic. In this paper, we propose an improved flow control for implementing fully adaptive routing algorithm on 2D mesh based NoC. Our proposed NoC router allows packet exchanges from escape virtual channels (EVCs) to adaptive VCs (AVCs). It also relaxes the atomic VC reallocation constraint for all EVCs as well as AVCs, which are located in router's local, east and west ports of the router. This approach guarantees that the abovementioned conditions still result in a deadlock-free routing. The proposed fully adaptive NoC outperforms the conventional fully adaptive router and partially adaptive router that uses odd-even routing by 80% and 25% higher average saturation injection ratio, respectively.