Paper co-authored by Alan Burns and Borislav Nikolic won the Best Paper Award 2018
23, Mar, 2018
The paper titled “Buffer-aware bounds to multi-point progressive blocking in priority-preemptive NoCs” co-authored by Alan Burns and Borislav Nikolic won the Best Paper Award 2018 at the DATE 2018 in Dresden.
The paper aims to reduce the pessimism of the analysis of the multi-point progressive blocking (MPB) problem in real-time priority-preemptive wormhole networks-on-chip. It shows that the amount of buffering on each network node can influence the worst-case interference that packets can suffer along their routes, and it proposes a novel analytical model that can quantify such interference as a function of the buffer size. It shows that, perhaps counter-intuitively, smaller buffers can result in lower upper-bounds on interference and thus improved schedulability. Didactic examples and large-scale experiments provide evidence of the strength of the proposed approach.
