Dynamic Transaction Management for System Level Quality-of-Service in Mobile APs

Recent consumer devices with high-quality multimedia support heavily rely on high performance application processors, each of which contain many masters (or processing units) such as CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs connected by high-bandwidth interconnection networks and share the memory. Each master running multimedia applications requires a specific amount of bandwidth from system resources to provide quality-of-service (QoS) capability. However, it is sometimes difficult to satisfy such bandwidth requirement of a master due to unpredictable conflicts on limited shared system resources. This is a problem that needs to be addressed in consumer multimedia devices in order to provide seamless services within limited performance boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel system-level QoS management scheme called dynamic transaction management (DTM) to address this anomaly. The proposed scheme collects the real-time bandwidth demand of masters, evaluates the gravity of their operations, and orchestrates their bandwidth consumption based on necessity. The evaluation results show that DTM effectively support bandwidth allocation by regulating the over-consumption of system resources by less urgent masters.