Virtual Channel aware Scheduling for Real Time Data-Flows on Network on-Chip

Abstract

The increasing complexity of real-time applications presents a challenge to researchers and software designers. The tasks of these applications usually exchange large volume of data-flows and often need to satisfy real-time constraints. Although the Network on-Chip (NoC) paradigm offers an underlying communication infrastructure that gives more hardware resources, it is unable to safe tasks and data-flows deadlines. In recent works, preemptive wormhole switching with fixed priority has been introduced to meet real-time constraints of real-time applications. However, it suffers some bottleneck such as hardware requirement where none of these works takes account of the number of implemented virtual channels on the router. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel scheduler for soft real-time data-flows application that takes into account the lack on resource in routers in term of Virtual channels. Experimental results obtained on a benchmark of synthetic and soft real applications have shown the efficiency of our approach in term of real-time constraints satisfaction for data-flow traffics and hardware requirements.