MP-Queue: an Efficient Communication Library for Embedded Streaming Multimedia Platforms

Abstract

In this paper we present MP-queue, a flexible and efficient queue-based communication library for MPSoCs. Our library is suitable for a wide range of hardware platforms and its configuration space is explored across a wide number of dimensions. We introduce an upper-bound evaluation metric to compare the efficiency of the library against an ideal point-to-point data transfer. We can thus quantitatively assess the overhead introduced by the synchronization protocol and by shared bus contention. We discuss source-level optimizations introduced in the library that enable aggressive compiler optimizations, without compromising code portability. A significant speedup is achieved w.r.t a non-optimized library (15% for small-size messages), while communication efficiency rises up to 90% for large messages.