Tree-based wireless NoC architecture: enhancing scalability and latency

The most recent and elegant solution to address the problem of scalability in network-on-chip (NoC) architectures is WiNoCs (Wireless NoCs).WiNoC, a wired-wireless hybrid architecture in NoC designs, is becoming increasingly popular for its fast unicast message delivery. However, modern applications often require multicasting and broadcasting messages instead. In the proposed work, the widely used simulation tool BookSim is employed, which offers reconfigurability and openness and it enables the analysis of both wired and wireless NoC architectures. This paper proposes a Tree-based Wireless NoC architecture approach incorporating MDND (message duplication in non-destination), which provides multicast support for WiNoC by exploring the inherent broadcast-type communication of wireless connection. Additionally, the proposed work supports the configuration of various aspects, including its multicast injection rate, enabling or disabling its multicast capabilities, and determining the number of multicast recipients for each packet. The proposed Tree-based approach showed a significant improvement in average multicast transaction latency compared to the traditional NoC. There is a noticeable reduction in the average network latency, the flit latency, and the total power. The analysis also shows a reduction in average packet latency for unicast messages and average packet latency for broadcast messages.