Performance Engineering of End-Systems for High Bandwidth Multimedia Communications (1995) [1 citations — 1 self]
Abstract:
The paper presents a performance-oriented study of end-systems for high bandwidth multimedia communications. A 2-layer communication architecture is identified, where the lower layer performs the segmentation/reassembly of data packets sent/received over the network and the upper layer performs the multiplexing/demultiplexing functions and enforces `quality of service ' (QOS) control on various data streams. The paper focuses on the performance engineering issues of such a communication system. We study the effects of parallelism and pipelining among layer functions, and inter-layer control transfer mechanisms on end-to-end throughput performance. The study involves conducting experiments on a system implemented using the 2-layer architecture. Based on the study, we suggest some techniques such as the usage of global data memory to minimize data movement across layers and block-mode synchronization of layer processes to achieve high performance. Based on the study, we believe that the future multimedia end-systems will reside on dedicated multiprocessor platforms, where our proposed architectural engineering techniques can be adopted easily and can take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities.
