In-order delivery approach for 2D and 3D NoCs

In many applications, it is critical to guarantee the in-order delivery of requests from the master cores to the slave cores, so that the requests can be executed in the correct order without requiring buffers. Since in NoCs packets may use different paths and on the other hand traffic congestion varies on different routes, the in-order delivery constraint cannot be met without support. To guarantee the in-order delivery, traditional approaches either use dimension-order routing or employ reordering buffers at network interfaces. Dimension-order routing degrades the performance considerably while the usage of reordering buffers imposes large area overhead. In this paper, we present a mechanism allowing packets to be routed through multiple paths in the network, helping to balance the traffic load while guaranteeing the in-order delivery. The proposed method combines the advantages of both deterministic and adaptive routing algorithms. The simple idea is to use different deterministic algorithms for independent flows. This approach neither requires reordering buffers nor limits packets to use a single path. The algorithm is simple and practical with negligible area overhead over dimension-order routing. The concept is investigated in both 2D and 3D mesh networks.