An Evaluation of Routing Algorithms in Traffic Engineering and Quality of Service Provision of Network on Chips

Nowadays the number of cores that are integrated into NoC (Network on Chip) systems is steadily increasing, and real application traffic, running in such multi-core environments requires more and more bandwidth. In that sense, NoC architectures should be properly designed so as to provide efficient traffic engineering, as well as QoS support. Routing algorithm choice in conjunction with other parameters, such as network size and topology, traffic features (time and spatial distribution), as well as packet injection rate, packet size, and buffering capability, are all equivalently critical for designing a robust NoC architecture, on the grounds of traffic engineering and QoS provision. In this paper, a thorough numerical investigation is achieved by taking into consideration the criticality of selecting the proper routing algorithm, in conjunction with all the other aforementioned parameters. This is done via implementation of four routing evaluation traffic scenarios varying each parameter either individually, or as a set, thus exhausting all possible combinations, and making compact decisions on proper routing algorithm selection in NoC architectures. It has been shown that the simplicity of a deterministic routing algorithm such as XY, seems to be a reasonable choice, not only for random traffic patterns but also for non-uniform distributed traffic patterns, in terms of delay and throughput for 2D mesh NoC systems.