A Link-Level Communication Analysis for Real-Time NoCs

Abstract

This thesis presents a link-level latency analysis for real-time network-on-chip interconnects that use priority-based wormhole switching. This analysis incorporates both direct and indirect interferences from other traffic flows, and it leverages pipelining and parallel transmission of data across the links. The resulting link-level analysis provides a tighter worst-case upper-bound than existing techniques, which we verify with our analysis and simulation experiments. Our experiments show that on average, link-level analysis reduces the worst-case latency by 28.8%, and improves the number of flows that are schedulable by 13.2% when compared to previous work.