Non-Intrusive NoC DFS for Soft Real-Time Multimedia Applications

Multimedia applications executing on NoC-based multicore architectures demand high performance and power-efficiency. We propose a low-cost NoC DPM controller that performs dynamic frequency scaling on each NoC router by activating shared memory-based monitoring probes at different parallel application slices or using an independent sample rate. We evaluate our DFS module by running an MPEG4 transfer speed test on a cycle-accurate, monitoring-aware SystemC virtual platform of a NoC-based MPSoC. The DFS module improves power-performance characteristics over existing techniques, and has minimal intrusion, significantly less than 0.01% of the total execution time.