Adaptive real-time scheduling for legacy multimedia applications

Abstract

Multimedia applications are often executed on standard personal computers. The absence of established standards has hindered the adoption of real-time scheduling solutions in this class of applications. Developers have adopted a wide range of heuristic approaches to achieve an acceptable timing behavior but the result is often unreliable. We propose a mechanism to extend the benefits of real-time scheduling to legacy applications based on the combination of two techniques: (1) a real-time monitor that observes and infers the activation period of the application, and (2) a feedback mechanism that adapts the scheduling parameters to improve its real-time performance.