Stealth-ACK: stealth transmissions of No C acknowledgements

作     者：Jinhua TAO Shi QIU Shaoli LIU Tianshi CHEN Rui MAO 

作者机构：Institute of Computing Technology Chinese Academy of Sciences College of Computer Science and Software Engineering Shenzhen University 

出 版 物：《Science China(Information Sciences)》 (中国科学:信息科学(英文版))

年 卷 期：2017年第60卷第9期

页      面：21-35页

核心收录：

学科分类：080903[工学-微电子学与固体电子学] 0809[工学-电子科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 08[工学] 

主　　题：networks-on-chip acknowledgement packet router architecture optimisation routing algorithm 

摘      要：Network-on-Chip(No C) is a promising replacement of bus architecture due to its better *** state-of-the-art No Cs, each packet contains several fixed-length flits, which facilitates allocations of network resources but brings in many unused bits. In this paper, we propose a novel technique called Stealth-ACK to effectively address the above problem. Stealth-ACK leverages unused bits in head flits of non-ACK packets to carry and stealthily transmit ACK information. Such stealth transmissions of ACK information effectively reduce not only the amount of dedicated ACK packets on No C, but also the number of unused bits in head flits of non-ACK packets, which significantly reduces wastes on No C bandwidth. Experimental results show that Stealth-ACK averagely increases the throughput of 16 × 16 2-D mesh No C by 11.9%, and averagely reduces the No C latency by 34.8% on application traces of SPLASH-2. Moreover, Stealth-ACK only requires trivial hardware modification to basic router architectures, which incurs negligible power consumption and area cost.