Static WCET analysis of the H.264/AVC decoder exploiting coding information

Multimedia playback programs must satisfy certain hard real-time constraints to give their user a pleasant viewing experience. Having a tight estimation on the worst case execution time (WCET) is essential for the resource scheduler to ensure all the tasks in the system can satisfy their timing requirements while maintaining good system resource utilization. In this paper we present a detailed hybrid WCET analysis of the H.264/AVC reference decoder and demonstrate that the coding information can be used to tighten the pure static WCET estimation up to 70%.