Game-Based Thermal-Delay-Aware Adaptive Routing (GTDAR) for Temperature-Aware 3D Network-on-Chip Systems

The thermal problem of three-dimensional Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) is proven to be severer than 2D NoC due to the stacking dies and heterogeneous thermal conduction between each silicon layers. To control the system temperature under a certain thermal limit, the current Dynamic Thermal Managements (DTMs) can be classified into temporal approaches and spatial approaches. The temporal DTM approaches reduce the processing speed of those overheated NoC components. However, for emerging cooling consideration, the full throttling scheme is usually applied as the system temperature reaches the alarming level, which results in significant system performance overhead. On the other hand, the spatial DTM approaches migrate the traffic load away from the overheated components. Although the spatial DTM approaches can mitigate the performance impact during the temperature control, the cooling period is longer than the temporal approaches because of the asynchronous phenomenon of traffic and temperature behavior among the NoC components. To consider the advantages of the temporal and spatial DTM approaches, it is necessary to synchronize the information of traffic and temperature behavior in the NoC systems. In this paper, we apply the Game Theory to propose a Game-based Thermal-Delay-aware Adaptive Routing (GTDAR) scheme. The GTDAR first adopts the Thermal-Delay principle to transfer the long-term temperature information to short-term traffic information by allocating the input buffer length of each NoC routers, which can reduce the thermal problem into the traffic problem. Afterward, the GTDAR involves the Nash Equilibrium property to distribute the packet routing to mitigate the thermal problem by considering the traffic and temperature simultaneously. In our experiments, the proposed Game-based Thermal-Delay-aware Adaptive Routing (GTDAR) scheme can help to improve 8.7 percent to 130 percent system performance with only 2.4 percent area overhead compared with the previous works.