Workstation video playback performance with competitive process load

Abstract

While many researchers believe that multimedia applications are best managed with hard, real-time scheduling mechanisms, models based on application-level adaptation with relaxed scheduling constraints are gaining acceptance. We analyze an existing video conferencing application that was designed without explicit support for CPU resource management, and propose modifications to its architecture to support CPU load adaptation. We show that this display jitter can be significantly reduced by gracefully adapting the application’s load requirements to match the available CPU resources.