Transport-Independent Protocols for Universal AER Communications

RAST, Alexander D, STOKES, Alan B, DAVIES, Sergio, ADAMS, Samantha V, AKOLKAR, Himanshu, LESTER, David R, BARTOLOZZI, Chiara, CANGELOSI, Angelo and FURBER, Steve (2015). Transport-Independent Protocols for Universal AER Communications. In: ARIK, Sabri, HUANG, Tingwen, LAI, Weng Kin and LIU, Qingshan, (eds.) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (9492). Springer, 675-684.

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Abstract

The emergence of Address-Event Representation (AER) as a general communications method across a large variety of neural devices suggests that they might be made interoperable. If there were a standard AER interface, systems could communicate using native AER signalling, allowing the construction of large-scale, real-time, heterogeneous neural systems. We propose a transport-agnostic AER protocol that permits direct bidirectional event communications between systems over Ethernet, and demonstrate practical implementations that connect a neuromimetic chip: SpiNNaker, both to standard host PCs and to real-time robotic systems. The protocol specifies a header and packet format that supports a variety of different possible packet types while coping with questions of data alignment, time sequencing, and packet compression. Such a model creates a flexible solution either for real-time communications between neural devices or for live spike I/O and visualisation in a host PC. With its standard physical layer and flexible protocol, the specification provides a prototype for AER protocol standardisation that is at once compatible with legacy systems and expressive enough for future very-large-scale neural systems.

Item Type:	Book Section
Page Range:	675-684
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	05 Feb 2020 14:48
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 02:38
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/24471

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