Network condition-aware communication mechanism for circuit-switched optical networks-on-chips.

Optical networks-on-chips (ONoCs) have emerged as a promising candidate for the future generation of multicore systems on chips. In ONoCs, an optical circuitswitching mechanism is preferred for its buffer-free mechanism. Unfortunately, blocking is a serious problem that restrains ONoCs from fully utilizing the available bandwidth. In this paper, a network condition-aware communication mechanism is proposed for circuit-switched optical networks-on-chip. The new mechanism employs a new joint metric of predicting the time and the number of blocking packets. The rules are defined according to the new metric for the setup packet, thus increasing the link utilization. Compared with previous methods, the simulation results based on synthetic traffic patterns and PARSEC benchmarks reveal that the proposed mechanism increases the efficiency of links, with higher throughput and lower endto- end latency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]