Enabling Streaming Remoting on Embedded Dual-Core Processors

Dual-core processors (and, to an extent, multicore processors) have been adopted in recent years to provide platforms that satisfy the performance requirements of popular multimedia applications. This architecture comprises groups of processing units connected by various interprocess communication mechanisms such as shared memory, memory mapping interrupts, mailboxes, and channel-based protocols. The associated challenges include how to provide programming models and environments for developing streaming applications for such platforms. In this paper, we present middleware called streaming RPC for supporting a streaming-function remoting mechanism on asymmetric dual-core architectures. This middleware has been implemented both on an experimental platform known as the PAC dual-core platform and in TI OMAP dual-core environments. We also present an analytic model of streaming equations to optimize the internal handshaking for our proposed streaming RPC. The usage and efficiency of the proposed methodology are demonstrated in a JPEG decoder, MP3 decoder, and QCIF H.264 decoder. The experimental results show that our approach improves the performance of the decoders of JPEG, MP3, and H.264 by 24%, 38%, and 32% on PAC, respectively. The communication load of internal handshaking has also been reduced compared to the naive use of RPC over embedded dual-core systems. The experiments also show that the performance improvement can also be achieved on OMAP dual-core platforms.