Quality-aware media scheduling on MPSoC platforms

Applications that stream multiple video/audio or video+audio clips are being implemented in embedded devices. A Picture-in-Picture (PiP) application is one such application scenario, where two videos are played simultaneously. Although the PiP application is very efficiently handled in televisions and personal computers by providing maximum quality of service to the multiple streams, it is a difficult task in devices with resource constraints. In order to efficiently utilize the resources, it is essential to derive the necessary processor cycles for multiple video streams such that they are displayed with some prespecified quality constraint. Therefore, we propose a network calculus based formal framework to help schedule multiple media streams in the presence of buffer contraints. Further, our framework also presents a schedulability analysis condition to check if the multimedia streams can be scheduled such that a prespecified quality constraint is satisfied with the available service. We present this framework in the context of a PiP application, but it is applicable in general for multiple media streams. The results obtained using the formal framework were further verified using experiments involving system simulation.