Deflection routing, where port-contentions in routers are resolved by intentionally misrouting some of packets along unwanted directions instead of storing them, has been proposed as a promising approach for improving power and area efficiency of large-scale networks on chip (NoCs). However, at high network load, when packets are misrouted more frequently, the cost and energy benefits of this simple routing scheme are offset by the performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose a technique that uses …