Dynamic and Static Task Allocation for Hard Real-Time Video Stream Decoding on NoCs

Hard real-time (HRT) video systems require admission control decisions that rely on two factors. Firstly, schedulability analysis of the datadependent, communicating tasks within the application need to be carried out in order to guarantee timing and predictability. Secondly, the allocation of the tasks to multi-core processing elements would generate different results in the schedulability analysis. Due to the conservative nature of the state-of-the-art schedulability analysis of tasks and message flows, and the unpredictability in the application, the system resources are often underutilised. In this paper we propose two blockingaware dynamic task allocation techniques that exploit application and platform characteristics, in order to increase the number of simultaneous, fully schedulable, video streams handled by the system. A novel, worst-case response time aware, searchbased, static hard real-time task mapper is introduced to act as an upper-baseline to the proposed techniques. Further evaluations are carried out against existing heuristic-based dynamic mappers. Improvements to the admission rates and the system utilisation under a range of different workloads and platform sizes are explored. 2012 ACM Subject Classification On-chip resource management