Keys for Administration of Reconfigurable NoC: Self-Adaptive Network Interface Case Study

Modeling Of Reconfigurable Network-On-Chip (Rnoc)

The development of embedded systems is based on hardware and software resources that are physically separated, but cooperate to achieve various tasks. The architecture is, therefore, composed of a set of components collaborating to execute application(s). At run-time, communication requirements can change according to data dependency, to application needs, to user choices in terms of concurrent application choices, to architecture hazards (cache coherency, for instance) and to network access conditions (data-rate, protocols, standards). It can also depend on architecture reconfiguration itself to implement or remove given functional blocks. Moreover, it is increasingly needed to be able to change the system architecture to add new services, which were not defined or known at design time.

To cope with these changes caused by ’natural’ consequences of the system evolution, the designer must include a control mechanism that transforms and adapts HW/SW environmental parameters to the new process and execution conditions, while avoiding or minimizing system downtime or interruption. This mechanism is called Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR).

In this section, we present the dynamic reconfiguration model and define the layered abstraction-based view. The model is derived from standard network abstraction OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) models and is adapted to RNoC.