Buffer‐aware bounds to multi‐point progressive blocking in priority‐preemptive NoCs
Leandro Soares Indrusiak1,a, Alan Burns1,b and Borislav Nikolić2
1University of York, York, UK
aleandro.indrusiak@york.ac.uk
balan.burnsg@york.ac.uk
2CISTER Research Centre, ISEP/IPP, Porto, Portugal
borni@isep.ipp.pt
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to reduce the pessimism of the analysis of the multi‐point progressive blocking (MPB) problem in real‐time priority‐preemptive wormhole networks‐on‐chip. It shows that the amount of buffering on each network node can influence the worst‐case interference that packets can suffer along their routes, and it proposes a novel analytical model that can quantify such interference as a function of the buffer size. It shows that, perhaps counter‐intuitively, smaller buffers can result in lower upper‐bounds on interference and thus improved schedulability. Didactic examples and large‐scale experiments provide evidence of the strength of the proposed approach.
