Dynamic Time-Slot Allocation for QoS Enabled Networks on Chip

MP-SoCs are expected to require complex communication architectures such as NoCs. This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first algorithm to dynamically perform rout-ing and allocation of guaranteed communication resources on NoCs that provide QoS with TDMA techniques. We test the efficiency of our algorithm by allocating the communi-cation channels required for an application composed of a 3D pipeline and an MPEG-2 decoder/encoder video chain on a 16 node MP-SoC. Dynamism in the communication is created by the 3D application. On a StrongARM proces-sor clocked at 200 MHz, the allocation time for one time-slot takes about 1000 cycles per hop in the connection. We show that central time-slot allocation algorithms are practi-cal for small-scale MP-SoC systems. Indeed, our algorithm can compute the allocation of 40 connections for a complex scene of the 3D pipeline in 450 to 900 µs, depending on the slot table size.