Priority-progress CPU adaptation for elastic real-time applications

Charles Krasic; Anirban Sinha; Lowell Kirsh

doi:10.1117/12.705735

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29 January 2007 Priority-progress CPU adaptation for elastic real-time applications

Charles Krasic, Anirban Sinha, Lowell Kirsh

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Proceedings Volume 6504, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2007; 65040G (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.705735
Event: Electronic Imaging 2007, 2007, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

As multimedia-capable, network-enabled devices become ever more abundant, device heterogeneity and resource sharing dynamics remain difficult challenges in networked continuous media applications. These challenges often cause the applications to exhibit very brittle real-time performance. Due to heterogeneity, minor variations in encoding can mean a continuous media item performs well on some devices but very poorly on others. Resource sharing can mean that content can work for some of the time, but real-time delivery is frequently interrupted due to competition for resources. Quality-adaptive approaches seek to preserve real-time performance, by evaluating and executing trade-offs between the quality of application results and the resources required and available to produce them. Since the approach requires the applications to adapt the results they produce, we refer to them as elastic real-time applications. In this paper, we use video as a specific example of an elastic real-time application. We describe a general strategy for CPU adaptation called Priority-Progress adaptation, which compliments and extends previous work on adaptation for network bandwidth. The basic idea of Priority-Progress is to utilize priority and timestamp attributes of the media to reorder execution steps, so that low priority work can be skipped in the event that the CPU is too constrained to otherwise maintain real-time progress. We have implemented this approach in a prototype video application. We will present benchmark results that demonstrate the advantages of Priority-Progress adaptation in comparison to techniques employed in current popular video players. These advantages include better timeliness as CPU utilization approaches saturation, and more user-centric control over quality-adapation (for example to boost the video quality of selected video in a multi-video scenario). Although we focus on video in this paper, we believe that the Priority-Progress technique is applicable to other multimedia and other real-time applications, and can similarly help them address the challenges of device heterogenity and dynamic resource sharing.

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Charles Krasic, Anirban Sinha, and Lowell Kirsh "Priority-progress CPU adaptation for elastic real-time applications", Proc. SPIE 6504, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2007, 65040G (29 January 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.705735

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