Optimizing Network-on-Chip using metaheuristic algorithms: A comprehensive survey

Network on Chip (NoC) is an interesting technology that benefits from several processing elements and the necessary communication facilities, to provide an answer to the ever-growing need for more processing power. Metaheuristic algorithms are important tools that have been used for dealing with various NP-hard problems in different domains. Such algorithms are also widely used in the NoC context by many frameworks for optimizing various characteristics of the NoC environments. Nonetheless, there is a lack of a comprehensive survey to put forward a thorough study of such schemes. To fill this gap, this article presents a comprehensive survey and classification of the metaheuristic-based schemes designed for various NoC topologies. For this purpose, first, some background knowledge is provided which helps to understand the studied schemes. Then, a taxonomy of the investigated approaches based on their applied metaheuristic algorithms is presented and in each category, schemes are studied and their main contributions and properties as well as their limitations are discussed. At last, a comparison of the techniques, tools, and methods that have been used in the studied schemes are provided along with the concluding remarks and future research directions.