Adaptive rate-controlled scheduling for multimedia applications

Abstract

We present a framework for integrated scheduling of continuous media (CM) and other applications. The framework consists of a rate-controlled on-line CPU scheduler, an admission control interface, a monitoring module and a rate adaptation interface. Rate-controlled scheduling allows processes to reserve CPU time to achieve progress guarantees. It provides firewall protection between processes such that the progress guarantee to a process is independent of how other processes actually make scheduling requests. Rate adaptation allows a CM application to adapt its rate to changes in its execution environment. We have implemented the scheduling framework as an extension to Solaris 2.3. We present experimental results which show that our framework is highly effective in scheduling CM and various other applications in a general purpose workstation environment.