Performance Engineering of End-systems for High Bandwidth Multimedia Communications

The paper presents a performance-oriented study of end-systems for high bandwidth multimedia communications. A 2-layer communication architecture is identiied, where the lower layer performs the segmentation/re-assembly of data packets sent/received over the network and the upper layer performs the multiplexing/demultiplexing functions and enforces`quality of service' (QOS) control on various data streams. The paper focuses on the performance engineering issues of such a communication system. We study the eeects of parallelism and pipelining among layer functions, and inter-layer control transfer mechanisms on end-to-end throughput performance. The study involves conducting experiments on a system implemented using the 2-layer architecture. Based on the study, we suggest some techniques such as the usage of global data memory to minimize data movement across layers and block-mode synchronization of layer processes to achieve high performance. Based on the study, we believe that the future multimedia end-systems will reside on dedicated multiprocessor platforms , where our proposed architectural engineering techniques can be adopted easily and can take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities. processing, sensitivity analysis of performance, design of experiments.