Rate-controlled scheduling for networked multimedia applications

Multimedia applications over the Internet are becoming increasingly popular. The soft real-time constraints of this type of application have given rise to interesting issues for scheduling in the network as well as the end systems. The paper presents a rate-based task scheduling framework for the receiving hosts. As multimedia streams are expected to be played back at constant rate, the proposed scheme tries to maintain the specified output frame rate by assigning proper deadlines to the frames. A multimedia stream that falls behind can catch up by skipping some frames. Interference among tasks is prevented using rate-controlled servers (RCS). The performance of these schemes has been analyzed mathematically and evaluated by simulations.