HNOCS: modular open-source simulator for heterogeneous NoCs

Abstract

We present HNOCS (Heterogeneous Network-on- Chip Simulator), an open-source NoC simulator based on OMNeT++. To the best of our knowledge, HNOCS is the first simulator to support modeling of heterogeneous NoCs with variable link capacities and number of VCs per unidirectional port. The HNOCS simulation platform provides an open-source, modular, scalable, extendible and fully parameterizable framework for modeling NoCs. It includes three types of NoC routers: synchronous, synchronous virtual output queue (VoQ) and asynchronous. HNOCS provides a rich set of statistical measurements at the flit and packet levels: end-to-end latencies, throughput, VC acquisition latencies, transfer latencies, etc. We describe the architecture, structure, available models and the features that make HNOCS suitable for advanced NoC exploration. We also evaluate several case studies which cannot be evaluated with any other exiting NoC simulator.