NoC Simulator

The Thesis
As I mentioned before I just finished my M.S. Thesis(March'07) up to get the M.S. in Telecomunications engineer degree.
The M.S. in Telecomunications in Spain is a long term degree(At least six years), comprising three engineers: Electronical Engineer + Communications Engineer + Signal processing Engineer. (You may know that each of these engineers degree is 3-4 years long in most of the countries).
Getting the degree took me 7 years, but the average spending time is around 8.5 years.

Developing the Thesis took me about 15 months. I know it seems a lot, but sometimes when you love the topic you focus on your own goals(usually higher than the standards), forgetting the academic framework. By doing this work forgetting the academic standards, I earned the grade excellent(10/10) with an added distinction of honours. But to be honest, what makes me proud is the work done, not the distinction. Going deeply in a NoC project has been an amazing, and at the same time incredibly hard task. Actually, what bothers me right now is not being able to continue with my work in NoC. As I see it, I have done the REALLY difficult part, because getting all NoC concepts and designing a modular and flexible C++ simulator was the boring part, and right now I'm able to do magic with this simulator. Of course I would improve the simulator, changing its view from a base system to a view oriented to the final user with a beautiful wrapper.

Thesis Goals
The goal of the thesis is to develop a flexible characterization system for NoC architectures that supports QoS traffic. This system will characterize the behaviour of different NoC architectures under specific net characteristics. Therefore, developing a final system for the full design space is completely ruled out. Nonetheless, one of the goals is to develop a modular system that allows enlarging the range of characterized NoC. Thus, It would be easier to add new commutation, routing and flow control strategies; as well as net topologies and router architectures.

Facing the problem
Up to achieve the simulator, the first step was to study the characteristics of NoCs and at some point define a general design space of NoCs interconnection networks. A study of the Simulators was also needed for viewing what kind of simulator could be the best covering the necessities of the NoC design space and to achieve modularity goals.
These studies gave the background needed for closing the specifications, which are the break point before designing and implementing the project.