BWE: a resource sharing protocol for multimedia systems with bandwidth reservation

In multimedia systems with soft real-time constraints, tasks must be guaranteed a certain system bandwidth so they can provide an acceptable performance to their users. In this paper a bandwidth exchange (BWE) protocol is proposed to manage resource sharing issues between tasks running on systems with CPU bandwidth reservation. The approach improves an earlier protocol, bandwidth inheritance (BWI), in that it provides bandwidth isolation not only between independent groups of tasks, but also between any two tasks within the same resource sharing group. BWE thus provides fairer resource allocation than BWI.