Many-core systems require inter-core communication, and network-on-chips\n(NoCs) have been demonstrated to provide good scalability. However, not only\nthe distributed structure but also the link switching on the NoCs have imposed\na great challenge in the design and analysis for real-time systems. With\nscalability and flexibility in mind, the existing link switching protocols\nusually consider each single link to be scheduled independently, e.g., the\nworm-hole switching protocol. The flexibility of such link-ba…