  A buffer-aware worst-case timing analysis of wormhole NoC is proposed in this
paper to integrate the impact of buffer size on the different dependencies
relationship between flows, i.e. direct and indirect blocking flows, and
consequently the timing performance. First, more accurate definitions of direct
and indirect blocking flows sets have been introduced to take into account the
buffer size impact. Then, the modeling and worst-case timing analysis of
wormhole NoC have been detailed, based on Network Calculus formalism and the
newly defined blocking flows sets. This introduced approach has been
illustrated in the case of a realistic NoC case study to show the trade off
between latency and buffer size. The comparative analysis of our proposed
Buffer-aware timing analysis with conventional approaches is conducted and
noticeable enhancements in terms of maximum latency have been proved.
