Scheduling security-critical multimedia applications in heterogeneous networks

Security is becoming an increasingly important issue in the design of multimedia applications, which are widely used in the industry and academic organizations. However, existing scheduling schemes for realtime multimedia service in heterogeneous networks generally do not take into account security requirements when making allocation and control decisions. In this paper, we develop and evaluate a security-critical multimedia scheduling scheme in the framework of heterogeneous networks. At first, we construct a general media distortion model according to the observed parameters in each network, as well as each application’s characteristic. After that, we exploit a scalable graph-based authentication method which achieves a good trade-off between flexibility and efficiency. Furthermore, a security-critical scheduling scheme is proposed by taking into account applications’ timing and security requirements in addition to precedence constraints. The proposed scheme is applied to heuristically find resource allocations, which maximize the quality of security and the probability of meeting deadlines for all the multimedia applications running on heterogeneous networks. Extensive simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed scheme. 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.