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Network-on-Chip(No C) is a promising replacement of bus architecture due to its better scalability.In 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.
Network-on-Chip (No C) is a promising replacement bus architecture due to its better scalability. In state-of-the-art No Cs, each packet contains several fixed-length flits, which facilitate allocations of network resources 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 stealily 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.