A software-controlled bandwidth allocation scheme for multiple router on-chip-networks

As the number of IP cores has been increasing in a System-on-Chip (SoC), multiple routers are included in on-chip-networks. Each router has its own arbitration policy and it is difficult to obtain a desired arbitration result by combining multiple routers. Allocating desired bandwidths to the ports across the routers is more difficult. In this paper, a guaranteed bandwidth allocation scheme using an IP-level QoS control is proposed to overcome the limitations of existing local arbitration policies. Each IP can control the priority of a packet depending on the data communication requirement within the allocated bandwidth. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism guarantees for IPs to utilize the allocated bandwidth in multiple router on-chip-networks. The maximum error rate of bandwidth allocation of the proposed scheme is only 1.9%.