Worst-Case Communication Time Analysis of Networks-on-Chip with Shared Virtual Channels

Network-on-Chip (NoC) based multi-and many-core architectures show high potential for use in real-time applications due to their superior efficiency. In real-time systems, it is necessary to guarantee that the application's timing requirements are met through the analysis of the worst-case behavior. A typical approach to guarantee real-time is the exclusive assignment of virtual channels to tasks or cores. Virtual channels, however, are a limited resource in NoCs. In future systems, there will be more tasks than virtual channels (VCs) in the network. In this paper, we propose a worst-case communication analysis of wormhole-switched best-effort NoCs (no special QoS mechanism) with SLIP arbitration and support to shared VCs. The approach is based on Compositional Performance Analysis, which enables non-symmetrical guarantees for the streams. The analysis is evaluated experimentally and compared with simulation and related work.