PROJECT TITLE :

PhaseNoC: Versatile Network Traffic Isolation Through TDM-Scheduled Virtual Channels

ABSTRACT:

As multi/several-core architectures evolve, the stress on the network-on-chip (NoC) are amplified. In addition to high performance and physical scalability, the NoC is increasingly needed to also offer specialised functionality, like network virtualization, flow isolation, and quality-of-service. Although traditional architectures supporting virtual channels (VCs) supply the resources for flow partitioning and isolation, an adversarial workload can still interfere and degrade the performance of other workloads that are active during a totally different set of VCs. During this paper, we tend to present PhaseNoC, a really noninterfering VC-based design that adopts time-division multiplexing at the VC level. Distinct flows, or application domains, mapped to disjoint sets of VCs are isolated, both inside the router's pipeline and at the network level. Any latency overhead is minimized by appropriate scheduling of flows in separate phases of operation, regardless of the chosen topology. When strict isolation is not required, the proposed design will use opportunistic bandwidth stealing. This novel mechanism works synergistically with the baseline PhaseNoC techniques to improve the overall latency/throughput characteristics of the NoC, whereas still preserving performance isolation. Experimental results corroborate that—with lower price than state-of-the-art NoC architectures, and with minimum latency overhead—PhaseNoC removes any flow interference and allows for efficient network traffic isolation.