Ensuring QoS of Multimedia Applications in Heterogeneous Home Networks: The CPU Use Case

This paper presents a framework to provide the right amount of resources to legacy multimedia application. Thus, these applications will provide the expected user-level QoS. When starting a multimedia application, the proposed framework provides admission control services for CPU reservation on all the devices used. The reservations are handled by broker components. The brokers use underlying operating system's mechanisms to start and stop reservations. Classically, devices of the home network make use of a General Purpose Operating System such as Linux. A lot of work has been done to integrate real-time schedulers in Linux or to provide distributed resource management frameworks. However it exists no solution that estimates, reserves and guarantees the quantity of CPU for multimedia applications. Moreover, modifying the devices' operating system may not be possible. Hence we propose a framework that supports both the standard Linux kernel and classical real-time scheduler. We evaluate the CPU resource management framework by testing multimedia applications, together with a stress on the CPU, on PCs and embedded devices (beagle boards).