Deadlock-Free Path-Based Fault-Tolerant Multicast Communications on 2-D Mesh Networks-on-Chip

Deadlock-Free Path-Based Fault-Tolerant Multicast Communications on 2-D Mesh Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

The move towards nanoscale Integrated Circuits (ICs) increases performance and capacity, but poses process variation and reliability challenges which may cause several faults on routers in Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). While utilizing healthy routers in an NoCs is desirable, faulty regions with different shapes are formed gathering faulty routers. Fault regions can be used to lead the fault-tolerant routing algorithms to perform data transmission between healthy routers. Besides, the increasing number of collective communication-based services with a mass interest and the parallel increasing demand for service quality are paving the way toward end-to-end quality of service guarantees. The collective communication services embrace multicast (the same message is sent from a source node to an arbitrary number of destination nodes). This paper presents the fault-tolerant mesh-based wormhole-switched NoCs which supports deadlock-free path-based multicast routing. This technique fills the gap of not having optimum multicast fault-tolerant wormhole-switched approaches and also maintains minimal routing path which tolerates both convex and concave fault regions while keeping the area and power overhead at a proper level. Multicast messages are injected to the network by sending a message header beforehand. The message header contains destination addresses to set-up multicast path connecting a source with multiple destination nodes. Moreover, the fault information is kept locally and each faultfree processor needs to know the status of the link incident on it only. Performance of the proposed methodology is simulated under different network conditions and show that it degrades gracefully in the presence of various fault patterns.

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