Efficient buffer capacity and scheduler setting computation for soft real-time stream processing applications

Soft real-time applications that process data streams can often be intuitively described as dataflow process networks. In this paper we present a novel analysis technique to compute conservative estimates of the required buffer capacities in such process networks. With the same analysis technique scheduler settings can be verified. Unlike many other soft real-time analysis techniques, it is guaranteed that the desired throughput is obtained for the input stream that is used to characterize the application. Experiments with artificial test-cases indicate that the computed FIFO capacities become more conservative if the desired throughput gets closer to the maximum throughput. The run-time of our algorithm for an H263 video decoder test-case was 14 seconds.