SMART NoC topology components, such as octagon, spidergon are progressively becoming the primary design choice for implementing the communication backbone in a multi-core SoC platform for lowering a high number of inter-router hops required by long-range traffic. However, aggressive technology scaling has increased the number of transient/permanent faults raising the reliability concerns in a SMART NoC. This paper presents a reliability monitoring scheme for addressing channel-short faults in the basic octagon NoC. Along with the online detection and diagnosis of short faults, an effective scheduling scheme is proposed to provide a low-cost test solution that outperforms over a set of prior schemes.