A Traffic-Aware Medium Access Control Mechanism for Energy-Efficient Wireless Network-on-Chip Architectures

Abstract: Wireless interconnection has emerged as an energy efficient solution to the challenges of multi-hop communication over the wireline paths in conventional Networks-on-Chips (NoCs). However, to ensure the full benefits of this novel interconnect technology, design of simple, fair and efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism to grant access to the on-chip wireless communication channel is needed. Moreover, to adapt to the varying traffic demands from the applications running on a multicore environment, MAC mechanisms should dynamically adjust the transmission slots of the wireless interfaces (WIs). Such dynamic adjustment in transmission slots will result in improving the utilization of the wireless medium in a Wireless NoC (WiNoC). In this paper we present the design of two dynamic MAC mechanisms that adjust the transmission slots of the WIs based on predicted traffic demands and allow partial packet transfer. Through system level simulations, we demonstrate that the traffic aware MAC mechanisms are more energy efficient as well as capable of sustaining higher data bandwidth in WiNoCs.