Network-on-Chip (NoC) have been used as an interesting option in design of communication infrastructures for embedded systems, providing a scalable structure and balancing the communication between cores. Because several data packets can be transmitted simultaneously through the network, an efficient routing strategy must be used in order to avoid congestion delays. In this paper, ant colony algorithms were used to find and optimize routes in a mesh-based NoC. The routing optimization is driven by the minimization of total latency in packets transmission. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the ant colony inspired routing by comparing it with general purpose algorithms for deadlock free routing under different traffic patterns.

network-on-chip, packet routing, ant colony optimization