Scheduling Mechanisms Reducing Contention Situations in Multimedia Systems

Multimedia applications have time dependancies and require appropriate resource management and scheduling mechanisms. Additionally, such applications have typically large resource requirements, hence, methods to reduce these requirements are desirable. Contention situations occur when the execution of processes overlaps in time. This leads to additional management efforts like context switches and to the increasing demand for resources like memory space. In this paper we present alternative scheduling methods suitable for real-time processes in multimedia systems. These methods serialize the execution of processes in order to reduce the occurence of overlaps. On the basis of measurements the described scheduling mechanisms are evaluated concerning their effectiveness and the required expenses.