Computation of buffer capacities for throughput constrained and data dependent inter-task communication

Abstract- Streaming applications are often imple-mented as task graphs. Currently, techniques exist to derive buffer capacities that guarantee satisfaction of a throughput constraint for task graphs in which the inter-task commu-nication is data-independent, i.e. the amount of data pro-duced and consumed is independent of the data values in the processed stream. This paper presents a technique to com-pute buffer capacities that satisfy a throughput constraint for task graphs with data dependent inter-task communica-tion, given that the task graph is a chain. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach by computing buffer ca-pacities for an MP3 playback application, of which the MP3 decoder has a variable consumption rate. We are not aware of alternative approaches to compute buffer capacities that guarantee satisfaction of the throughput constraint for this application. 1