Abstract
A large portion of area and power in Network-on-Chip (NoC) routers is consumed by buffers, and hence these costly storage resources must be utilized well. However, some early related literatures are not suitable for modern NoC router architectures as well as various complicated traffic loads anymore. In this thesis, we resurveyed the conventional statically-allocated multi-queue (SAMQ) and dynamically-allocated multi-queue (DAMQ) buffer schemes. Furthermore, we proposed a new DAMQ-based buffer organization that can accommodate multiple packets more than the number of virtual channels, named DAMQ with multiple packets (DAMQ-MP). The DAMQ-MP scheme not only can bring standby packets in advance to reduce the waiting latencies of switching packets, but also can compact several short packets in few router nodes to release more virtual channel resources. This directly solves certain data transmission issues under some circumstances, such as heavy network congestion or short packets, to improve performance. We also introduced two methods applicable to DAMQ-based buffers, which are adding priorities for switch allocation and reserving certain virtual channels for high-priority packets. Experimental results show that DAMQ-MP routers generally can have better performance and higher buffer utilization rate than SAMQ and DAMQ counterparts in most cases. We believe that DAMQ-MP is the easiest and feasible method to improve buffer organization for modern NoC routers without sophisticated hardware design modifications.