JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 4, APRIL 2012, ISSN 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.

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RTCC-Pyramid-NOC: Scalable, Regular and symmetric Network-on-chip topology

Reza Kourdy Department of Computer Engineering Islamic Azad University, Khorramabad Branch, Iran Mohammad Reza Nouri rad Department of Computer Engineering Islamic Azad University, Khorramabad Branch, Iran

Abstract Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed as an attractive alternative to traditional dedicated wires to achieve high performance and modularity. Network Topology is one of the most important concerns in NoC architecture design. The choice of network topology is important in designing a high-performance NoC. In this paper, we survey the simulation of the RTCCPyramid to be used as the Scalable and Regular topology in NoC. The Recursive Transpose-Connected Cycles (RTCC) is a new modular topology for interconnection networks. The RTCC has a recursive definition quite similar to that of fractal graphs having interesting topological characteristics, making it suitable for utilization as the base topology of large-scale multicomputer interconnection networks. The RTCC is superior to conventional topologies such as the mesh and k-ary n-cube. Index Terms RTCC-Pyramid, Network-on-Chip(NoC), Recursive Transpose-Connected Cycles(RTCC), System-onChip(SoC), WK-Recursive.

1 INTRODUCTION
emiconductor technology has evolved towards System-on-Chip (SoC), in which all the functions required for a particular product is integrated into a single silicon chip. SoC technology is capable of cutting the development cycle while increasing the performance, functionality and quality of the product. In other words, previous separate processing, communication and memory elements will be placed on one tiny chip. SoC based systems are built by assembling predesigned elements called IP (Intellectual Property) cores in order to reduce the corresponding design complexity and the design costs. Interconnections on chip have been proven to be a major source of energy consumption in SoC designs. In fact, it is projected that, as the semiconductor technology scales to the nanometer field, the energy consumption of global interconnections will be a dominant bottleneck for SoC design [1, 2]. Especially for battery operated, personal computing devices [3], minimizing the energy consumed in on-chip interconnects becomes a crucial issue and the designers are striving to improve the lifetime of such devices. Dally and Towles [4 have recently proposed a regular tile-based architecture which can realize the communication efficiently through the on chip network. Data on NoC are packetized and transmitted like computers do on traditional networks. Researches show that NoC can meet the future requirements of SoC design on reusability and bandwidth scalability. NoCs offer well-dened interfaces [6, 6, 7, 8], decoupling computation from communication, and easing design. It has been shown that NoCs can provide interfaces to existing on-chip communication protocols, such as AXI

[9], OCP [10], DTL [11], thus, enabling reuse of existing IP modules [6, 12]. A disadvantage of large interconnects in general (e.g., buses with bridges, or NoCs) is that they introduce uncertainties (e.g., due to contention). Applications also introduce uncertainties as they become more dynamic and heterogeneous. All these complicate integration, especially in hard real-time systems (e.g., video), as the user expects the resulting system to be predictable.

2 THE RTCC NETWORK

The Recursive Transpose-Connected Cycles (RTCC) Network is a class of recursively scalable networks, denoted by RTCC(C, L) , that is constructed hierarchically by grouping basic cycle modules. Any C-node cycle can serve as the basic modules. With continuous increases in network size, routing in networks with faulty nodes has become unavoidable. Routing through node-disjoint paths in interconnection networks can not only provide alternative routes to tolerate faulty nodes but also avoid communication bottlenecks. Moreover, routing through node-disjoint paths can speed up the transmission time by distributing data among disjoint paths. Thus, the study of disjoint paths connecting any two nodes can be useful for increasing the reliability of interconnection networks, as well as transmission efficiency. A larger number of disjoint paths is more desirable because of less vulnerability to disconnection. The study of node-disjoint paths varies according to the number of source and destination nodes. There are three well-known paradigms: one-to-one routing that constructs the maximum number

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of node-disjoint paths in the network between two given nodes, one-to-many routing that constructs node-disjoint paths in the network from a given node to a given set of nodes, and many-to-many routing that constructs nodedisjoint paths between a given set of nodes. Using these paradigms, node-disjoint paths have been extensively studied on some networks [13, 14 and 15].

2.1. Definition of the RTCC(C, L) The definition of the RTCC(C, L) is based on a C-node cycle. We name all the nodes in this cycle, Extern nodes or Open nodes. An RTCC(C, 2), consists of a number of C discrete RTCC(C, 1) networks, or C-node cycles, numbered 0 to C-1. Each external node i of each C-node cycle j is connected to node j of C-node cycle i. It is obvious that a node whose number is equal to the number of the RTCC(C, 2) in which it resides, is not directly connected to any other cycle, and is of node degree one less than other nodes in the network. There is one such node in each RTCC(C, 1) used to construct an RTCC(C, 2), and thus a total of C such nodes. We name these nodes as the external nodes of the RTCC(C, 2), the number of each one being equal to the number of the RTCC(C,1) to which it belongs. In a similar manner, the RTCC(C, 3) can be defined as C discrete RTCC(C, 2) networks that are connected in such a way that each external node i in RTCC(C, 2) number j is connected to external node j in RTCC(C, 2) number i. Once again, a node whose number is equal to the address of the RTCC(C,2) in which it resides, is not directly connected to any other cycle, and is of node degree one less than other nodes in the network [16]. Fig. 1 shows an RTCC (4,2).

node with addressing scheme (k, (akak-1 a1)) is said to be a node at level k, e.g. the apex is at level 0. The part (akak-1 a1) of the address determines the address of a node within the RTCC network at layer k. All the nodes in level k form an RTCC (C, L) network. K L Hence, there exist a total of N= K = 0 C =(CL+1-1)/C-1 nodes in a P-RTCC(C, L). A node with address (k,(akak1a1)) is connected, within the RTCC network at level k>0, to node (k,( akak-1 a2(a11)mod C)) , as the neighboring brother nodes, and connected to a node with address schema (k,(akak-1 aj+2 aj+1aj(aj-1)j), 1jL-1) if there exists one j such that 1jL-1, aj-1=aj-2==a1 and ajaj-1; as a cousin node (nodes at the same level). This node is also connected to nodes (k+1,(akak-1 a2a1b), for 1b C, in level k+1, as a child node, and connected to node (k1,(akak-1a2)), in level k-1, as a father node. Fig. 2 illu-

Fig.2. RTCC-pyramid network, P-RTCC(4,2)

Fig. 1: The topology of RTCC(4,2)

3 RTCC-PYRAMID NETWORK
An RTCC-pyramid network, denoted as P-RTCC(C,L), consists of a set of nodes V(P-RTCC(C,L)) = { (k, (akak-1 a1)) | 0 k L, 0 ai C-1, 1 i k or k=0 and a1=1 }. A

strates an RTCC-pyramid network, P-RTCC(4,2) [15] (see Figure 2). The most similar networks to the RTCC(C, L) are the OTIS networks, the swapped networks, and WKrecursive networks. The WK-Recursive Network [21], is, denoted WK (d, t), that is also constructed by hierarchically grouping basic modules. Any d-node complete graph can serve as the basic modules. WK (d, t) a network of level t whose basic modules are of d-node complete graph, Kd. The connection between sub-graphs in this graph is similar to the RTCC(C, L). The total number of links within a WK(C, L) is however greater than an RTCC(C, L) with the same base graph and number of levels. Nevertheless, they have the same number of nodes and the same diameter.

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Fig.4. (a) pyramid -WK(4, 2) b) pyramid-RTCC(4,2) Fig.3. (a)WK(4, 2)

(b)RTCC(4,2).

4 RTCC AND WK-RECURSIVE STRUCTURES

Figure 3 shows Comparing WK-recursive and RTCC in the same size : WK(4, 2) and RTCC(4,2). As shown in Figure 3, the difference between these two topologies is some of links.

just C+3 channels and each non extern node in the bottom layer has 4 neighbors and each extern node in the last layer has 3 links. The node at level 0 has just C neighbors. Obviously each extern nodes at any layer has one neighbor less than the other nodes in the same layer(see Figure 4).

4.1 pyramid -WK and Pyramid-RTCC Another useful network topology which has been used as the base of both hardware architectures and software structures is the pyramid. By exploiting the inherent hierarchy at each level, pyramids structures can be efficiently exploited to handle various problems in graph theory, digital geometry, machine vision, and image processing [17-19]. Pyramids have therefore gained much attention in past studies and numerous properties of them have been studied. An L level RTCC-pyramid uses an RTCC network structure in each level as an alternative to the Mesh network used to construct the conventional mesh-pyramid network. For the RTCC-pyramid, node degree is independent of network size. Each node in the internal layers has exactly C+4 neighbors if it is not an extern node, and has C+3 neighbors if it is an extern node, each node in layer 1 has

5. RELATED WORK
To overcome the problem of unbounded node complexity in large hypercube and star graphs, constant-degree variants, such as the cube-connected cycles, de Bruijn graphs, butterfly networks[20], WK-Recursive networks[21], Recursive Hierarchical Swapped network[22] and OTIS networks[23], have been proposed in the literature and have been shown to possess several desirable properties. The most similar networks to the RTCC(C, L) are the OTIS networks, the swapped networks, and WKrecursive networks. The OTIS network [5], is constructed of |G| copies (clusters) of an |G|-node nucleus or basic graph G, numbered from 0 to |G|-1. Node i in cluster j is connected to node j in cluster i for all i j. The RTCC(C, 2) can be considered as an OTIS network, where G is a C-node cycle. But for L>2, the definition of

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the RTCC(C, L) differs from the OTIS network. Also, OTIS networks were proposed to properly exploit electronic and optical links. That is, all the links within basic graphs (Gs) are of electronic, while, the inter-cluster links are implemented as optical links. An l-level hierarchical swapped network [4], Sw (G, l), is also based on a nucleus graph G. To build an l-level swapped network, Sw (G, l), we use Nl-1=|Sw (G, l-1)| identical copies of Sw (G, l-1) network. Each copy of Sw (G, l-1) is viewed as a level-l cluster. Node i in cluster j is connected to node j in cluster i for all i j, 0 i, j Nl-1. It is easy to see that Sw (G, 2) is topologically equivalent to the OTIS-G.

7. SIMULATION METHODOLOGY
In this section, simulation of RTCC-Pyramid on-chip interconnects is done by using a simulator developed in [24]. This discrete event driven simulator is based on ns2 [25] that provides many facilities to describe network topology, transmission protocols, routing algorithms, and traffics generation. The main objective of using ns2 is to rapidly explore and evaluate the performance metrics as well as the energy consumption of on-chip interconnects.

6. PYRAMID-NOC-WK AND PYRAMID-NOC-RTCC

Since this on-chip interconnect has many attractive properties, such as high degree of regularity, symmetry and efficient communication, RTCC and WKRecursive networks have received considerable attention in parallel computing community.The WKrecursive mesh and RTCC networks can outperform the well-known 2D mesh topology for Network-on-chip (NoC) systems. Fig.5. shows pyramid -WK(4, 2) and Pyramid-RTCC(4, 2) structures for Network-on-chip (NoC)

7.1 SIMULATION DETAILS The topmost shared component in simulation is the NoC node, in which PE (Processing Element) and router are the main components. The PE is a module that injects/ejects the generated/receiving packets based on a traffic model like uniform, hotspot, etc. Routers receive packets on their input channels and after routing a packet based on the routing algorithm and destination address, the packet is sent to the selected output channel. When a specific topology like mesh or WK-recursive is supposed to be modeled by such components, a top-level wrapper module is implemented that connects several nodes of this type to each other based on the structure of the specified topology. Ns-2 [26] is a discrete event network simulator designed for simulation of ordinary networks of computers. As many models of network components are provided, the user can simulate at a high abstraction level. Yet, it is possible to implement new components in the network model. Ns-2 has support for local area networks, mobile networks and even satellite networks. Two computer languages are used in ns-2, namely C++ and OTcl.

8. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we present the Simulation of NoC with different levels with the topology pyramid-noc-RTCC. We survey the ability and flexibility of ns2 in simulations. Figures 6 to 11, show different views of simulations

8.1. pyramid-noc-RTCC WITH 3 LEVELS Simulation of pyramid-noc-RTCC with 3 levels:

Fig.5. (a) pyramid-NOC-WK(4, 2)

(b) pyramid-NOC-RTCC(4,2)

systems.

Fig.6. pyramid-NOC-RTCC (4,2)

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Fig.8. pyramid-noc-RTCC WITH 4 LEVELS

Fig.7. 2nd view of pyramid-NOC-RTCC (4,2)

8.2. PYRAMID-NOC-RTCC WITH 4 LEVELS

Simulation of PYRAMID-NOC-RTCC WITH 4 LEVELS:
Fig.9. 2nd View of pyramid-noc-RTCC WITH 4 LEVELS

Fig.10. 3rd View of pyramid-noc-RTCC WITH 4 LEVELS

Fig.8. 3rd view of pyramid-NOC-RTCC (4,2)

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Fig.11. 4th View of pyramid-noc-RTCC WITH 4 LEVELS

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Reza Kourdy received his B.Sc. Degree in Computer Engineering and his M.Sc. Degree in Computer Architecture both from Azad University of Arak, Iran, in 2002 and 2007, respectively. His research interests include Network-On-Chip Architecture and Faulttolerance.

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Mohammad Reza Nouri Rad received his B.Sc. Degree in Computer Engineering Software from Azad University of Najafabad, Iran, in 2001, and his M.Sc. Degree in Computer Software from Azad University of Arak, Iran, in 2010. His research interests include NetworkOn-Chip Architecture and Network Security. He is Program Committee of following conferences : WICT 2011 CSNT 2011 CICN 2011 SocProS 2011 CSNT 2012 CICN 2012 BIC-TA 2012