A proposed bus arbitration scheme for multimedia workstations

The integration of video and audio into computers requires the support of continuous data streams at the hardware level. This paper proposes a bus bandwidth management and access arbitration scheme for a multimedia workstation. It assumes that a multimedia workstation consists of several specialized processing modules which are linked by a packet-switched bus. Using the proposed scheme, the bus can support a mix of continuous media streams and random transactions while fulfilling special requirements of each traffic type. Specifically, the bus provides fast response to random transactions and serves continuous media streams in such a way that no packet misses its deadline. Furthermore, the performance with respect to continuous media traffic is maintained independent of time variations of random traffic. Practical implementation guidelines are provided. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is compared with alternative approaches