User focus in consumer terminals and conditionally guaranteed budgets

Abstract

Media processing in software enables consumer terminals to become open and flexible. Because consumer products are heavily resource constrained, this processing is required to be cost-effective. Our QoS approach aims at cost-effective media processing in software. QoS resource management is based on multilevel control, corresponding to different time-horizons, and resource allocation below worst-case using periodic budgets provided by a budget scheduler. Multilevel control combined with budgets below worst-case gives rise to a problem related to user focus. Upon a sudden increase in load of an application with user focus, its output will have a quality dip. To resolve this user focus problem, we present the novel concept of a conditionally guaranteed budget (CGB). A feasible extension of our budget scheduler with CGBs is briefly described.