Scheduling Mechanisms Reducing Contention Situations in Multimedia Systems

Contention situations occur when the execution of processes overlaps in time. This leads to additional management efforts like context switches and to the increasing demand for resources like memory space. In this paper we present alternative scheduling methods suitable for real-time processes in multimedia systems. These methods serialize the execution of processes in order to reduce the occurence of overlaps. On the basis of measurements the described scheduling mechanisms are evaluated concerning their effectiveness and the required expenses. 1 Introduction To process the data packets of a continuous-media stream, resources such as buffer space are necessary. A simple approach for the assignment of that resource is the fixed, non-shared assignment of buffer space to a stream. This way, the buffer space is always available at the arrival of a data packet. However, the buffer space is unused after the processing of a packet has been finished until the next packet arrives. If a differ..