Hybrid path-diversity-dominant output selection method for Network-on-Chip systems

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) offers considerable performance improvement to Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). As the communication between processors on NoC increases, its system performance faces a severe challenge in congestion issues. Adaptive routing algorithm for NoCs provides a variety of path options, thus, it has fantastic potential to achieve better traffic distribution across the network by avoiding the congested regions. An excellent output selection method can realize the potential of adaptive routing algorithm as highly as possible. Therefore, designing an efficient output selection method is highly desirable. Conventional output selection methods only consider local information (buffer vacancy) or global information (path diversity) separately, which makes them difficult to spread traffic to different paths for load balance. In this paper, we propose an efficient output selection method integrating global information of path diversity and local information of buffer vacancy, to solve congestion problem in NoCs.