Schedulability analysis for desktop multimedia applications: simple ways to handle general-purpose operating systems and open environments

Unlike traditional real-time applications, multimedia applications are commonly deployed on top of general-purpose operating systems in open environments. Because Rate Monotonic Analysis (RMA) assumes that the total system workload is known in advance and uses worst case values for operating system overhead (e.g., context switch time), it has not been usable for personal computer and workstation based multimedia applications. We extend RMA to model systems where these OS services have highly non-deterministic timing behavior and where the total system workload is not specified in advance. We validate our techniques by modeling a video telephony application based on Intel's ProShare(R) technology.