PowerAntz: Ant behavior inspired power budget distribution scheme for Network-on-Chip systems

In Network-on-Chip (NoC) based complex system design on-chip power management is a challenging issue. Most power management schemes fail to provide optimal power sharing among on-chip routers when the power budget distribution varies significantly due to their non-uniform placement on chip. This paper presents PowerAntz, an ant system inspired distributed power management strategy for NoC based systems. This is an adaptive and distributed approach to power sharing across routers of a large network on chip and it is shown to be a scalable solution. A detailed flit accurate simulator was developed in SystemC to evaluate the efficiency of the technique. The experiments demonstrate PowerAntz to be up to 30% more effective in distributing power budget compared to existing strategies. Further, it also achieves up to 21.25% improvement in power budget utilization while keeping the energy overhead negligible for best case scenarios.