New Theory for Deadlock-Free Multicast Routing in Wormhole-Switched Virtual-Channelless Networks-on-Chip

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 22; no. 4; pp. 544 - 557
• Main Authors: Samman, Faizal, Hollstein, Thomas, Glesner, Manfred
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-04-2011; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Arbitration; Channels; Computer languages; Computer networks; Concurrent computing; Data communication; Hardware; Id-tag-based wormhole packet switching; Multicast; Multicast algorithms; Multicast protocols; Multiplexing; Network-on-a-chip; Network-on-chip; Parallel programming; Routers; Routing; Routing (telecommunications); runtime adaptive routing and scheduling; System recovery; tree-based and multipath-based multicast routing
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2010.120

A new theory for deadlock-free multicast routing especially used for on-chip interconnection network (NoC) is presented in this paper. The NoC router hardware solution that enables the deadlock-free multicast routing without utilizing virtual channels is introduced formally. The special characteristic of the NoC is that, wormhole packets can cut-through at flit-level and can be interleaved in the same channel with other flits of different packets by multiplexing it using a rotating flit-by-flit arbitration. The routing paths of each flit can be guaranteed correct because flits belonging to the same packet are labeled with the same local Id-tag on every communication channel. Hence, multicast deadlock problem can be solved at each router by further applying a hold-release tagging mechanism to control and manage conflicting multicast requests.