A dynamic adaptive arbiter for Network-on-Chip

Network-on-chip (NoC) is considered as a promising paradigm to overcome the communication bottleneck of future multicore systems. As a basic component in on-chip router, arbiter has a big impact on the performance of router. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamically adaptive arbiter which is based on the round robin mechanism. The proposed arbiter detects buffer status of input ports and changes priorities of the input port dynamically to enhance the performance of the router. Simulation results show that the proposed arbiter can achieve 7.3% improvement in saturation packet injection rate and 13.3% improvement in saturation throughput of NoC on average, when compared with round robin arbiter. Using Synopsys design tools with 0.18-μm technology, implementation results show that a router with the proposed arbiter needs additional 4.8% area compared to a router with round robin arbiter.