ABSTRACT
Once the topology of the network is designed, messages need to be forwarded from their sources to their destinations, using the physical connections established by the topology. As the topology will offer many possible paths for every message, we need to select which path to use on a per message basis. In addition, the selection of specific paths may lead to situations where the performance of the system degrades dramatically or even the entire system collapses. Therefore, the way messages are routed is one of the key design decisions for an operative and efficient network-on-chip (NoC). Such decisions are taken based on a routing algorithm run on every switch in the network and potentially also at the network interface of the node that injects the message.
