Exploiting antenna directivity in wireless NoC architectures

Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) is an emerging on-chip communication paradigm and a candidate solution for dealing with the scalability problems which affect current and next generation many-core architectures. In a WiNoC, the transceivers that allow the conversion between electrical and radio signals, account for a significant fraction of the total communication energy budget. In particular, the transmitting power for wireless communications is strongly affected by the orientation of the antennas. This paper studies the impact of antennas orientation on energy figures of a WiNoC architecture and performs a design space exploration for determining the optimal orientation of the antennas in such a way to minimize the communication energy consumption. Experiments have been carried out on state-of-the-art WiNoC topologies, on both synthetic and real traffic scenarios, and validated by means of a commercial field solver simulator. When the antennas are optimally oriented, up to 80% energy saving (as compared to the case in which antennas have all the same orientation) has been observed.