Improved Priority Assignment for Real-Time Communications in On-Chip Networks

The Network-on-Chip is the on-chip interconnection medium of choice for modern massively parallel processors and System-on-Chip in general. Fixed-priority based preemptive scheduling using virtual-channels is a solution to support real-time communications in on-chip networks. However, the different characteristics of the Network-on-Chip compared to the single processor scheduling problem prevents the usage of known optimal algorithms (e.g. the Audsley's algorithm) to assign priorities to messages. A heuristic search algorithm based approach (called the HSA) focusing on the priority assignment for on-chip communications has been presented in the literature. The HSA is much faster than an exhaustive search based solution, with a price of missing certain schedulable cases (i.e. non-optimal). In this paper, we present two undirected-graph based priority assignment algorithms, the GESA and the GHSA. In contrast to the previous work, we can decrease the search space significantly by taking the interference dependencies of different messages on the network into account. A number of experiments are generated, in order to evaluate the proposed algorithms. The results show that the GESA can always achieve higher schedulability ratios than the HSA, but may require longer processing time. On the other hand, the GHSA has the same performance as the HSA regarding the schedulability, but can significantly improve the efficiency.