Access pattern based stream buffer management scheme for portable media players

Limited amount of main memories are often available on mobile phones and portable media players. In multitasking environments, however, programs often need to wait for pages to be loaded to the main memory, even for the pages once loaded but swapped out due to memory shortage. Such page fault mechanism provided by the operating system often becomes the main hindrance to the uninterrupted playback of multimedia players on portable electronic devices. In this paper, we propose a memory management scheme that helps multimedia players perform with a consistent quality, when other processes are concurrently running on memory limited environments. We devise a profile-based memory allocation scheme for multimedia stream buffers with the adoption of page prefetching and pinning. Using periodic monitoring points of main loops, we profile access patterns of memory, analyze the meaningful access patterns for stream buffers and provide the access pattern information for custom memory management. Our scheme helped reduce the number of page faults in heap. Reductions in page faults for a multimedia player are 60~80% under various memory-limited execution environments.