Modern systems-on-chip (SoCs) today contain hundreds of cores, and this\nnumber is predicted to reach the thousands by the year 2020. As the number\nof communicating elements increases, there is a need for an efficient, scalable and\nreliable communication infrastructure. As technology geometries shrink to the deep\nsubmicron regime, however, the communication delay and power consumption of global\ninterconnections become the major bottleneck. The network-on-chip (NoC) design\nparadigm, based on a modular packet-switched mechanism, can address many of the\non-chip communication issues, such as the performance limitations of long interconnects and\nintegration of large number of cores on a chip. Recently, new communication technologies\nbased on the NoC concept have emerged with the aim of improving the scalability limitations\nof conventional NoC-based architectures. Among them, wireless NoCs (WiNoCs) use\nthe radio medium for reducing the performance and energy penalties of long-range and\nmulti-hop communications. As the radio medium can be accessed by a single transmitter\nat a time, a radio access control mechanism (RACM) is needed. In this paper, we present a\nnovel RACM, which allows one to improve both the performance and energy figures of the\nWiNoC. Experiments, carried out on both synthetic and real traffic scenarios, have shown\nthe effectiveness of the proposed RACM. On average, a 30% reduction in communication delay and a 25% energy savings have been observed when the proposed RACM is applied to a known WiNoC architecture.
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