Run-Time Remapping Algorithm of Dataflow Actors on NoC-Based Heterogeneous MPSoCs

Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) platforms have been emerging as the main solution to cope with processor frequency ceiling and power density issues while still improving performances. Then, network-on-chip (NoC) has been adopted to provide the increasing number of processors with the required communication bandwidth as well as with the necessary flexibility. Video processing and streaming applications are adopting dynamic dataflow model of computation as the need for high performance parallel computing is growing. Dataflow applications executed on modern MPSoC-based architectures are becoming increasingly dynamic and more data-dependent. Different tasks execute concurrently with significant modifications in their workloads and resource demanding over time depending on the input data. Hence, adopting any static or offline dynamic scheduling for mapping tasks will not cope with the computation variations. This article introduces an original run-time mapping algorithm based on the Move Based (MB) method targeting a dedicated heterogeneous NoC-based MPSoC architecture to achieve workload balancing and optimized communication traffic. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by conducting cycle-accurate SystemC simulations of the adopted NoC implementing a real MPEG4-SP decoder. The obtained results reveal the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. For various real-life videos, the proposed algorithm systematically succeeded to enhance significantly the performance.