Energy-aware application mapping methods for mesh-based hybrid wireless network-on-chips

Abstract

The 2D mesh topology-based Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a prevalent structure in System-on-Chip (SoC) designs, offering implementation and fabrication benefits. However, increased NoC scale leads to longer communication paths, more hops, and higher end-to-end latency and energy consumption. To mitigate these issues, Wireless NoC (WiNoC) integrates wireless communication, enhancing data rates, energy efficiency, and routing flexibility. Despite several mapping algorithms for NoCs, optimal techniques for hybrid WiNoCs are underexplored. This study proposes two novel application mapping methods for 2D mesh topology-based hybrid WiNoCs, using quadratic programming (QP) and simulated annealing (SA). Our goal is to minimize communication-related energy consumption. We evaluated these methods across various wireless router configurations, benchmarks, and custom application graphs. The QP-based method excels in smaller problems, while the SA-based approach yields optimal or near-optimal results for larger sizes within practical runtimes.