Improved Ant Colony Algorithm Based on Task Scale in Network on Chip (NoC) Mapping

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper proposes a task mapping method for multi-core, Network on chip processors.

I have some concerns about the paper:

Extensive editing of English language and style are required. Some acronyms are used before they are define (e.d. DAG). Fix that. When selecting the optimization algorithm, it is not clear the reason why ACO is finally chosen. Figures do not indicate that this is the best algorithm. Moreover, there are lots of metaheuristic optimization algorithms, but the authors have only compared three of them. Conclusions are poor and there are no proposals for future research work.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper describes a modified Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for Network on Chip mapping.

The paper is interesting and suitable to this journal. The state of the art is clearly described and experiments and results are reported and commented.

However, the writing style should be improved. There are long sentences or sentences hard to understand.

From the technical point of view, the only weak part of the paper is the description of the modified K-means and of the Improved ACO algorithm.

Concerning the K-means, it is necessary to introduce at least a pseudocode. Moreover, some details are missing. For example, is there a maximum number of iterations as stopping criteria? A typical K-means requires to evaluate the centroids changes and, in order to prevent non convergence of the algorithm, a maximum number of iteration is set. In this case, how the centroids changes are evaluated? Is there a threshold for considering the centroids changes negligible?

Also the Improved ACO method should be better described. In this case, Authors reported a flow chart, but it is not sufficiently commented. I suggest to delete the flow chart and insert a pseudocode, together with comments. In this case, it is of crucial importance to increase the reproducibility of the proposed method.

As a minor point, figures 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 are blurred and hard to read.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have done the adequate changes. From my point of view, only minor revision is required. As an example, a reference seems to be lost (line 285, page 12). I also propose changing "Tradition ACO" by "Traditional ACO (line 245, page 10).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors addressed all my comments. I recommend this paper for publication.

Author Response

Thanks so much!