Rapid prototyping with constraints-based scheduling for multimedia applications

Abstract

With the increased demand in multimedia applications, the need to provide better system support is greater than ever. Multimedia applications have an added dimension of time in their execution which results in stringent timing requirements. Existing systems incorporate such stringent timing requirements either at the system-level or the application-level. System-level supports are typically operating-system-dependent whereas application-level supports are achieved by building timing controls into the application itself. This lengthens the application development time and fails to take full advantage of operating system's capabilities. In this paper, we propose a framework that resides between the system-level and application-level support. The framework consists of two layers: an interface layer that incorporates high-level end-to-end timing constraints, and a system layer that implements a host-end scheduling mechanism to support high-level end-to-end timing specifications. Two applications have been developed using this framework. The results indicate that the framework is able to support rapid-prototyping of multimedia applications with stringent timing requirements.