SCNoCs: An Adaptive Heterogeneous Multi-NoC with Selective Compression and Power Gating

In-network compression has been proposed recently to support efficient communication. However, we find employing compression blindly cannot always pay off since de/compression leads to extra packet transmission delay. We thereby propose selective compression which compresses data adaptively based on network state and predicted compression ratio. Moreover, we observe that simply applying selective compression in a conventional single network is not energy efficient. Therefore, we propose SCNoCs, a heterogeneous Multi-NoC (Main-Net and HelperNet) architecture with the support of selective compression and power gating. SCNoCs can dynamically adjust the policy of selective compression and the utilization degree of the Helper-Net according to the network state at runtime. Experimental results show that our selective compression outperforms conventional compression by 1.5×. Besides, our proposed SCNoCs achieves comparable performance while reducing energy consumption by 43.4%, compared with the baseline.