Flow Control for Interconnection Networks

An interconnection network is characterized by its topology, routing and flow control. The topology is a directed graph, where the nodes represent the routing modules and the edges represent the channels. Routing specifies how a packet chooses a path on this graph. Flow control examines the allocation of resources, mainly channels and buffers to a packet as it traverses this path. This paper summarizes five works on flow control, each optimizing different performance and reliability metrics, such as throughput, latency and quality of service, in an attempt to examine them under the prism of their applicability for on-chip interconnects. A Critical review and a number of optimizations are also presented.