Modeling and Synthesis of On-chip Dynamic Multimedia Traffic

Girish Varatkar Radu Marculescu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA Abstract The objectives of this paper are twofold: First, to introduce the self-similarity as a fundamental property exhibited by the bursty traffic between on-chip modules in typical MPEG-2 video applications. Indeed, statistical tests performed on relevant traces extracted from common video clips establish unequivocally the existence of self-similarity in on-chip video traffic. Second, we describe a technique for synthetically generating traces having statistical properties similar to those obtained from real video clips. Our proposed technique speeds up buffer simulations, allows media system designers to explore architectures more rapidly and use large media data benchmarks more efficiently. We believe that our findings open up new directions of research with deep implications on some fundamental issues in on-chip network design for multimedia applications.