Evaluation of a software-based centralized traffic management inside run-time reconfigurable regions-of-interest of a mesh-based Network-on-Chip topology.

This work proposes the introduction of multiple spatially independent network interfaces in order to connect computational resources to mesh-based Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). Furthermore, a flexible system for traffic monitoring is introduced supporting runtime reconfigurability as well as software-based centralized data aggregation and evaluation. These approaches are combined to form a sophisticated hardware/softwareframework for run-time traffic management of NoC-based many-core systems exploiting the dual-path options of the underlying network. The conducted simulations show that this framework is capable of significantly decelerating thermal wear-out, while improving performance characteristics (e. g. packet delay) at moderate additional costs. Thereby, the resulting solution is evaluated in a simulation flow that considers the cycle-accurate timing of all hardware/software components and activity related temperature effects regarding the power dissipation as well as the reliability.