A Power Efficient, Oblivious, Path-Diverse, Minimal Routing for Mesh-based Networks-on-Chip

One of the most trade-off aspects in the design of NoCs is the improvement of the network performance, in terms of throughput and latency, while minimizing power consumption. 2D-mesh has become the preferred topology, since it offers low and constant link delay. This paper proposes a Power efficient, Oblivious, Path-diverse, Minimal routing (POPM) for mesh-based Networks-on-Chip. In order to improve the performance of the network, POPM makes routing decisions locally at each hop rather than establishing a fixed and deterministic path between the source and destination nodes. POPM routes each packet separately through a path selected from among all minimal paths. Detailed simulations on a set of synthetic traffic patterns as well as a real application traffic pattern show that POPM competes favorably to existing routing algorithms, including dimension-ordered (DOR) routing, North-Last turn model, and PROM routing.