A Scheduling Method for Real-time Decoding of MPEG-4 Video Streams

Increasing use of bandwidth-hungry high-quality multimedia streams demands more and more computation resources in the decoding stages at receivers. When poorly scheduled, however, computation resources may become a limiting factor to implementing seamless on-time playback of multimedia streams. In this paper, we present a new adaptive scheduling method for real-time MPEG-4 streams. The main objective of our approach is to maximize the number of concurrent multimedia streams without any loss in playback. The tasks of decoding MPEG-4 multimedia streams, considered to possess soft real-time characteristics, are scheduled to use computation resources based on their frame period and mean execution time. The performance of the proposed technique is compared against those of similar techniques through extensive simulation experiments. The simulation results reveal that the proposed method can effectively control the use of computation bandwidth.