Performance Evaluation of Nano-On-Chip

Interconnect for SoCs

O. Yalgashev, M. Bakhouya, A. Chariete, J. Gaber
University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard
Rue Thierry Mieg, 90000 Belfort, France
{olimjon.yalgashev, abderrahim.chariete, gaber}@utbm.fr
International University of Rabat
Technopolis Rabat-Shore, 11 100 Sala el Jadida, Morocco
mohamed.bakhouya@uir.ac.ma
by, for example, replacing some of the multi-hop wire links
with high-bandwidth single-hop long-range wireless channels
[8] [9] [10] [11] [12]. Several studies have shown that wireless
NoCs are promising alternatives to conventional OCIs, which
allow reducing latency and energy dissipation in
communication between remote nodes.

AbstractThe On-Chip Interconnects (OCI) infrastructure

represents one of most important components in determining the
overall performance of future System-on-Chip (SoC). Recently,
nano-communication has emerged as a new paradigm that allows
nanomachines to communicate using mechanisms, such as
molecular-based, electromagnetic-based, acoustic-based, and
mechanical-based techniques. In this paper, we study and
evaluate the performance of the electromagnetic-based
communication technique as an on-chip communication fabric
for SoCs. Simulations have been conducted and preliminary
results are reported to shed more light on the performance of this
technique for large SoCs.

In this paper, we study and evaluate the performance of a

nano-communication mechanism as an on-chip interconnects
for SoCs. It is based on the electromagnetic-based
communication technique used for connecting nanonodes. The
remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2
presents related works to nano-communication paradigm. The
evaluation methodology and preliminary results are presented
in Section 3 and Section 4 followed by a summary and
discussion in Section 5.

Keywords Nano-networking; System-On-Chip; Network-onchip; Simulation.

I.

INTRODUCTION

II.

Embedded computing systems have become widespread in

various application domains, as evident from their use in
products
such
as
PDAs,
household
appliances,
telecommunication, and automotive systems. This has been
further accelerated by the advances in silicon technology,
which had led to the design of complex and large SoCs. These
systems are composed of several processing elements (PEs),
i.e. dedicated hardware and software components that are
interconnected by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) [1] [2].
According to Moores law, the number of cores on-chip will
double every 18 months; therefore, thousands-cores on-chip
will be integrated in the next 20 years in order to meet the
power and performance requirements of applications.

In the past few years, many research works have been

conducted in the area of engineering and the development of
nanotechnology applications and protocols [13]. As stated in
[13] [14] a nanomachine is a device, consisting of nanoscale
components, able to perform a specific task at nanolevel, such
as communicating, computing, data storing, sensing and/or
actuation. Nanoscale communication mechanisms could be
classified in four main categories, molecular-based, acousticbased, nanomechanical-based and electromagnetic-based
communication mechanisms.
Nanonetworks molecular communication use molecules
and their components, such as gap junctions, receptors, nucleus
etc. [13]. Molecular communication between nanoscale entities
occur in nature, it explains why using molecular
communication is particularly useful. Besides, the
nanonetworks can be built upon such naturally occurring
phenomena with appropriate instrumentation and offers a faster
engineering pathway to viable solutions. The most importantly
reasons is that several of applications require bio-compatibility
and hence necessitate properties that are readily offered by
nanonetworks using molecular communication [15].

NoC infrastructure represents one of most important

components in determining the overall performance (e.g.
latency, throughput), reliability, and cost (e.g. energy
consumption, area overhead) of future SoCs. Different OCIs
(on-chip interconnect) architectures have been proposed in the
literature, examples are Mesh, Fat Tree, Spidergon [3] [4] [5]
[6]. However, while microchip technology miniaturizes and
gates become faster and more energy efficient, wires used for
the communication between cores are performing slowly and
are more energy-hungry [7]. Therefore, these OCIs might
suffer from the problems of power and delay overhead.
Recently, Radio Frequency (RF)/Wireless NoC, 3D NoC,
photonic NoC have been introduced to alleviate these problems

978-1-4799-5313-4/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

RELATED WORK

In acoustic communication, message transmitted and

received occur by encoding of using acoustic energy, i.e.,
sound is produced when a physical object vibrates rapidly,

512

disturbs nearby air molecules (or other surrounding medium),

and generates compression waves that travel in all directions
away from the source. The mechanism primarily used in
building underwater communication. At the fundamental of
underwater acoustic communications exists several factors
such as long delay spread, fast time varying channel, long
propagation delay, and limited signal bandwidth of the signal,
which in part is drastically different from RF/Wireless
networks [16] [17] [18].

Nanorouters are also nanodevices, with larger size and resource

compared with nanonodes/nanosensors. They collect and
process information coming from nanonodes using short
control messages. The nanointerface is the most complex node,
acting as a gateway, responsible for communication of the
nanosystem with the external communication devices [21] [22].
Nano-Sim has been coded in C++ by using the object-oriented
paradigm, in order to ensure modularity, flexibility, and high
performance [21].

Nanomechanical phenomena play a fundamental role in a

number of nanoscience and nanotechnology applications, such
as telecommunication. In [19], authors have reported
experimental results on a dual suspended core nanomechanical
optical fibre that requires a considerable amount of processing,
such as switching, routing, and buffering of information. In
nanomechanical communications, information flows through
the mechanical connection of nanoscale devices, it means that
the transmission of information between the transmitter and the
receiver occurs through mechanical channels based on the
fundamental behavior at the nanoscale, such as the nature of
heat dissipation, thermal transport and scattering, and
mechanical coupling between nanoscale objects [13].

In what follows, two routing protocols and two traffic

patterns are considered. The two routing protocols are flooding
and X-Y routing. Flooding is a fundamental communication
primitive for wireless networks. It is widely involved in routing
protocols and used by applications including unicast routing
protocols. In the flooding protocol, neighboring nanonodes
rebroadcast received packets from other nanonodes. Using XY
routing protocol in nanonetworks, neighbor nanonodes can
control rebroadcasting; a broadcasted packet is accepted, if it is
routed towards its destination along a suitable path. In this
paper, the topology considered is a wireless mesh. A mesh
network allows that decisions on traffic can be made locally.
Since the network is assumed to be a regular grid, using XY
routing, a packet first travels along X and then Y direction to
reach a destination node.

The research on Electromagnetic nanonetworking is in its

early stage, although this direction of research is rapidly
gaining the attention of scientific community [20] [21] [22]
[23] [24]. There are many issues, which should be solved. For
instance, it is very important to create theoretical and practical
aspects for forming nanodevices and connection methods
among them. Since nanonodes have very small size, the
following issues need to be highlighted: 1) building
nanodevices (nano electromagnetic transceiver, nanoactuator,
nanosensor, nanomemory, nanoantenna, nanoprocessor could
be part of nanodevices); 2) creating nanonetwork architectures
(defining types and functions of nanonodes); 3) communication
methods (terahertz band, channel capacity, information
encoding, protocols, etc.) [20] [21] [22]. Designing
electromagnetic nanonetworking approach is proposed in [20]
[23] [24].

In this paper, the protocols are evaluated using the mesh

topology under different traffic patterns such as Transpose and
Uniform. In Transpose pattern, the node with binary value
a (i, j) communicates with the node a (j, i) (see Fig. 1). In
Uniform pattern, source and destination nodes are randomly
selected. The simulations parameters are presented in table-1.
Parameters for the physical layer are chosen in accordance with
[25] [21].

Especially, analytical performance evaluation and

simulation tools are required to study new protocols and
standards. The main objective of our work is develop these
communication mechanisms in one simulation software tool
and study there performances in similar environments. In this
paper, we emphasize on the performance of the
electromagnetic
communication
mechanism
as
a
communication medium for SoC applications.
III.

Fig. 1. 4x4 mesh based topology and the Transpose traffic pattern
TABLE I.

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

The performance evaluation study was conducted using a

simulation
tool,
Nano-Sim,
for
Electromagnetic
nanonetworking [21]. Three types of nanodevices are
implemented for Electromagnetic nanonetworks in Nano-Sim
tool, nanonodes, nanorouters, and gateway (nanointerface).
Nanonodes are very small devices, which have very limited
energy for computations and data storage, compared to nodes
in classical networks. They act as a relay in nanonetwork.
Nanosensors are one type of nanonodes, but with sensing
abilities. They observe surrounding environment to collect
required information and propagate in the nanonetwork.

513

SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Parameter

Value

Simulation duration

4s

Number of nanonodes

from 4 to 900

Artery size

10-3x10-3x0.5m3

Pulse energy

100 pJ

Pulse duration

100 fs

Pulse Interarrival Time

10 ps

Transmission Range

0.0065

Routing protocol

XY routing, flooding

TTL

Different values according to the number of

nanonodes
Packet size

128 bytes

Message generation time

interval per source

0.2 s

IV.

SIMULATION RESULTS

The results reported in this paper emphasize on the

performance of the Electromagnetic communication technique
for SoCs. In order to compare the two routing protocols and
study their scalability, we have used two metrics: latency and
protocol overhead. The latency gives a measure of the time
required, on an average, for each packet to reach its destination.
Fig. 4. Protocol overhead for transpose traffic pattern

Fig. 4 illustrates the protocol overhead when the Transpose

traffic pattern is used. The number of received, forwarded, and
dropped packets is considered in calculating the protocol
overhead. The X-axis shows the number of nanonodes, and the
Y-axis shows the packets number delivered, forwarded and
dropped. It can be observed, as expected, that as the number
the nanonodes increases the overhead increases slightly for XY
routing and significantly for the flooding protocol. This can be
explained by the diffusion nature of the flooding protocol when
compared to the XY protocol in which packets are not
duplicated. The same behavior is observed for the Uniform
traffic pattern, as illustrated in Fig.5.

Fig. 2. Latency evaluation for transpose traffic pattern

As shown in Fig. 2, latency is similar for XY and flooding

for the transpose traffic pattern. This is due to the fact that the
average length of delivery paths, which is proportional to the
diameter, is similar. Fig. 3 presents the latency comparison for
XY routing and flooding for the uniform traffic pattern and
shows same behavior. The latency increases with the number
of nanonodes in both cases.

Fig. 5. Protocol overhead for Uniform traffic pattern

V.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper, simulations have been conducted to shed first

more light on the performance of the Electromagnetic in the
context of SOC applications. These results highlighted the need
for adaptive approaches and topologies to limit packet
retransmissions, latency and protocol overhead. Our ongoing
work focuses on an adaptive approach to select better suitable
transmission techniques together with more evaluation of other
OCI architectures.

Fig. 3. Latency evaluation for uniform traffic pattern

Since nanonodes have limited capabilities (energy, power),

redundancy is an important issue that should be considered.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the EU EACEA Erasmus
Mundus TARGET II project (2012-2015).

514

REFERENCES
[1] L. Benini and G. Micheli, "Networks on chips: A new soc
paradigm," IEEE Computer, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 70-78,
2002.
[2] R. Marculescu, J. Hu and U. Ogras, "Key research
problems in NoC design: a holistic perspective," in
Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis,
2005. CODES+ISSS '05. Third IEEE/ACM/IFIP
International Conference, 2005.
[3] P. Pande, C. Grecu, M. Jones, A. Ivanov and R. Saleh,
"Performance evaluation and design trade-offs for
network-on-chip interconnect architectures," Computers,
IEEE Transactions, vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 1025 - 1040, 2005.
[4] S. Suboh, M. Bakhouya, S. Lopez-Buedo and T. ElGhazawi, "Simulation-based approach for evaluating onchip interconnect architectures," in SPL Proc, 2008.
[5] A. Chariete, M. Bakhouya, J. Gaber and M. Wack,
"FracNoC: a Fractal On-Chip Interconnect Architecture
for System-on-Chip," in HPCS, Finland, 2013.
[6] S. Suboh, M. Bakhouya, J. Gaber and T. El-Ghazawi,
"An Interconnection Architecture for Network-on-Chip
Systems," Telecomm. Syst (Springer), vol. 37, no. 1-3, pp.
137-144, 2008.
[7] L. Guang, E. Nigussie, P. Rantala, J. Isoaho and H.
Tenhunen, "Hierarchical agent monitoring design
approach towards self-aware parallel systems-on-chip,"
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
(TECS), vol. 9, no. 3, 2010.
[8] S. F. Brett and P. P. Pande, "Networks-On-Chip in a
Three Dimensional Environment: A Performance
Evaluation," IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), vol.
58, no. 1, pp. 32-45, 2009.
[9] A. Shacham, K. Bergman and C. L. P., "Photonic
Network-on-Chip for Future Generations of Chip MultiProcessors," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 57,
no. 9, pp. 1246-1260, 2008.
[10] M. Chang, J. Cong, A. Kaplan, M. Naik, G. Reinman, E.
Socher and S.-W. Tam, "CMP network-on-chip overlaid
with multi-band RF-interconnect," High Performance
Computer Architecture. IEEE 14th International
Symposium, pp. 191 - 202, 2008.
[11] Y. P. Zhang, M. Z. Chen and M. Sun, "Propagation
Mechanisms of Radio Waves Over Intra-Chip Channels
With
Integrated
Antennas:
Frequency-Domain
Measurements and Time-Domain Analysis," IEEE
Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 55, no.
10, 2007.
[12] C. Wang, W.-H. Hu and N. Bagherzadeh, "A Wireless
Network-on-Chip Design for Multicore Platforms," in
International Euromicro Conference on Parallel,
Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), 2011.
[13] I. F. Akyildiz, F. Brunetti and C. Blzquez,
"Nanonetworks: A new communication paradigm,"

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]

[18]

[19]

[20]

[21]

[22]

[23]

[24]

[25]

515

Computer Networks: The International Journal of

Computer and Telecommunications Networking, vol. 52,
no. 12, pp. 2260-2279, 2008.
C. Chen, Y. Haik and J. Chatterjee, "Development of
nanotechnology for biomedical applications," in
Proceedings of the Emerging Information Technology,
2005.
S. G. Glisic, Advanced Wireless Communications &
Internet: Future Evolving Technologies, Third Edition,
Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated, 2011.
R. Diamant and L. Lampe, "A Hybrid Spatial Reuse
MAC Protocol for Ad-Hoc Underwater Acoustic
Communication
Networks,"
in
Communications
Workshops (ICC), 2010 IEEE International Conference
on, Capetown , 2010.
W. Fox, P. Arabshahi, S. Roy and N. Parrish,
"Underwater Acoustic Communications Performance
Modeling in Support of Ad Hoc Network Design," in
OCEANS 2007, 2007.
K. Bengston and M. Dunbabin, "Design & Performance
of a Networked Ad-hoc Acoustic Communications
System using Inexpensive Commercial CDMA
Modems," in OCEANS 2007, 2007.
Z. Lian, H. Peter, X. Feng, X. L., K. Frampton, N. White,
J. Tucknott, H. Rutt, D. Payne, W. Stewart and W. Loh,
"Nanomechanical functionality of dual-core fibres," in
Optical Fiber Communication Conference, 2013.
I. F. Akyildiz and J. M. Jornet, "Electromagnetic
Wireless Nanosensor Networks," Nano Communication
Networks (Elsevier), vol. 1, pp. 3-19, 2010.
G. Piro, L. Grieco, G. Boggia and P. Camarda,
"Simulating wireless nano sensor networks in the ns-3
platform," in Proc. of Workshop on Performance
Analysis and Enhancement of Wireless Networks,
Barcelona, Spain, 2013.
G. Piro, L. Grieco, G. Boggia and P. Camarda, "NanoSim: simulating electromagnetic-based nanonetworks in
the network simulator 3," in SimuTools '13 Proceedings
of the 6th International ICST Conference on Simulation
Tools and Techniques, 2013.
F. Akyildiz, J. Jornet and M. Pierobon, "Propagation
Models for Nanocommunication Networks," in Proc. of
the 4th European Conference on Antennas and
Propagation (EuCAP), Barcelona, Spain, 2010.
I. Akyildiz and J. Jornet, "Channel modeling and capacity
analysis for elec tromagnetic wireless nanonetworks in
the terahertz band," IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 3211 -3221, 2011.
J. Pujol, J. Jornet and J. Pareta, "PHLAME: A physical
layer aware MAC protocol for electromagnetic
nanonetworks,"
in
Computer
Communications
Workshops, IEEE, 2011.