A Multicore Operating System with QoS Guarantees for Network Audio Applications

This paper is about the role of the operating system (OS) within computer nodes of network audio systems. While many efforts in the network-audio community focus on low-latency network protocols, here we highlight the importance of the OS for network audio applications. We present Tessellation, an experimental OS tailored to multicore processors. We show how specific OS features, such as guaranteed resource allocation and customizable user-level runtimes, can help ensure quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for data transmission and audio signal processing, especially in scenarios where network bandwidth and processing resources are shared between applications. To demonstrate performance isolation and service guarantees, we benchmark Tessellation under different conditions using a resource-demanding network audio application. Our results show that Tessellation can be used to create low-latency network audio systems.