Guaranteed-throughput improvement techniques for connectionless ring networks

At the University of Twente, a prototype MPSoC has been developed specifically for real-time applications, like SDR. This class of applications place strict requirements: of a guaranteed minimum bandwidth and a maximum bound on the latency of communication between tasks running on different cores. Communication within the platform is performed over a connectionless NoC, which should allow a small implementation. However, strict guarantees are harder to accomplish in a connectionless network compared to a connection-oriented network. We implemented a separation of these two types of traffic within the connectionless ring network. By doing so, different guarantees can be offered by the ring for data and credit traffic to match their requirements. The separation allows an increase in guaranteed data bandwidth by utilizing knowledge of a mapped task graph and the communication channels between these tasks for a small increase in hardware costs. Furthermore it is shown that an abstraction can be made of the ring network improvement techniques in a compact SDF graph.