FT-PDC: an enhanced hybrid congestion-aware fault-tolerant routing technique based on path diversity for 3D NoC

In recent years, using three-dimensional Network-on-Chip (3D-NoC) has increased due to its high performance and integration of processing elements. However, as technology evolves, dimension of processing elements and the number of connections are decreasing and this increases their sensitivity to external factors. Therefore, fault detection is one of the most important challenges of designing 3D-NoC because even a transistor not working well may cause the whole system not to work. Many methods have been provided so far to make three-dimensional NoC tolerant against fault, but most of these methods suffer from some disadvantages. For example, their fault detection models are not strong enough or they do not consider the network traffic. Regarding these problems, in this article, a routing technique called fault-tolerant routing algorithm based on path diversity and congestion (FT-PDC) for three-dimensional mesh connectivity based on NoC is provided that has some features like finding the shortest current path, considering fault in vertical and horizontal links, and considering path diversity and congestion. In addition to these features, FT-PDC could solve the problems of other methods to a great extent considering network traffic conditions and sending the packet from a path in which traffic conditions are two hops better than the other paths. These features have led to the superiority of the proposed method over other methods. The simulation results in the Noxim simulator show that latency and throughput of FT-PDC compared to similar recent methods have significantly improved.