Open Theses

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Ongoing Theses

1. Dynamically adapting fault tolerant end-to-end protocol for Networks-On-Chip (Master Thesis)

In an On-Chip network (Networks-on-Chip, NoC) external influences (e.g. radiation) or permanent faults in network components (e.g. broken wires) may lead to corruption of data packets or to their loss. To guarantee a reliable intercommunication between network nodes even in presence of faults flow control protocols are used. A common type of flow control protocols used to guarantee reliable intercommunication is the End-to-End (E2E) protocol.

To handle the loss of data packets, E2E protocols make use of timers. If no acknowledgement for a packet is received by the sender before the timer elapses, the packet is considered to be lost and thus it is retransmitted. Static timer values have shown to be appropriate for scenarios with small network load and a low probability of faults. However, if network load increases, this causes the timer to elapse before acknowledgements can arrive at the sender. Thus, packets are unnecessarily retransmitted which in turn leads to an even higher increase of network load.

In this thesis an existing fault tolerant E2E flow control protocol for NoCs shall be extended so that it takes network parameters into account to adjust the timers online. For this an appropriate monitoring shall be designed and implemented that e.g. measures the current network load and provides information to the protocol. It has to be considered, that the overhead caused by transmissions of monitoring data shall be kept as minimal as possible.

For more infomation please contact Gert Schley