The Role of Back-Pressure in Implementing Latency-Insensitive Systems

Back-pressure is a logical mechanism to control the flow of information on a communication channel of a latency-insensitive system (LIS) while guaranteeing that no packet is lost. Back-pressure is necessary for building open LISs and it represents an interesting design alternative also for closed LISs because it makes possible to realize highly modular implementations with more predictable features in terms of design overhead (area, power). In discussing the role of back-pressure, we revisit the logic of the necessary building blocks, and explain the impact of the system topology on the system performance.