An optimized mapping algorithm based on simulated annealing for regular NoC architecture

Network on chip (NoC) architecture is viewed as a potential solution for the interconnect demands of the emerging multi-core systems since it renders the system high performance, flexibility and low-cost. Mapping tasks onto different cores of the network is a critical phase in NoC design because it determines the energy consumption and packet latency. In order to reduce the energy consumption of applications running on multi-core architecture, we propose a new mapping strategy based on Simulated Annealing (SA). By allocating tasks that have big communication volume to adjacent places on the mesh, the proposed method overcomes the shortcoming of blind search in traditional SA. The experiment results reveal that the solutions generated by the proposed algorithm reduce average energy consumption by 56.56% in mapping 16 tasks and 66.32% in mapping 49 tasks compared with traditional Simulated Annealing (SA). © 2011 IEEE.