Medium Access Control in Wireless Network-on-Chip: A Context Analysis

Wireless on-chip communication is a promising candidate to address the performance and efficiency issues that arise when scaling current Network-on-Chip (NoC) techniques to manycore processors. A Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) can serve global and broadcast traffic with ultra-low latency even in thousand-core chips, thus acting as a natural complement of conventional and throughput-oriented wireline NoCs. However, the development of Medium Access Control (MAC) strategies needed to efficiently share the wireless medium among the increasing number of cores remains as a considerable challenge given the singularities of the environment and the novelty of the research area. In this position paper, we present a context analysis describing the physical constraints, performance objectives, and traffic characteristics of the on-chip communication paradigm. We summarize the main differences with respect to traditional wireless scenarios, to then discuss their implications on the design of MAC protocols for manycore WNoCs, with the ultimate goal of kickstarting this arguably unexplored research area.
Comment: To appear in IEEE Communications Magazine