Network Coding in Networks-on-Chip with Lossy Links

Providing a reliable and efficient communication infrastructure becomes more important and more demanding for current and future Many-core System-on-Chips. The increased amount of communication partners demands for efficient resource usage. At the same time, an on-going feature size reduction and supply-voltage level reduction renders the SoC vulnerable to bit errors. Our work aims at providing a generalized analysis of network-coded Networks-on-Chip with multicast support and unreliable links. We compare network-coded with dimension-routed NoCs in terms of their hop counts and achievable long-term rates. The results show that for an 8 \(\times \) 8 2D-mesh setup, network-coding yields a 1.7\(\times \) to 8.3\(\times \) better hop count and can achieve a 1.2\(\times \) to 3.7\(\times \) higher rate as dimension-routed 8\(\,\times \,\)8 NoCs for bit error probabilities of \(10^{-12}\) to \(10^{-3}\) and 10% multicast traffic.