Implementation Issues for Scalable Real-time Multimedia Communication Systems

Mathias Johanson Framkom Research Corporation Sallarängsbacken 2 S-431 37 Mölndal, Sweden mathias@framkom.se Abstract Real-time multimedia communication applications have a potential to be implemented on very different types of equipment, ranging from wireless handheld devices to high-end desktop workstations. The emergence of mobile IP networks will make it possible to communicate using rich media in an increasingly more ubiquitous fashion. This means that the applications must be highly scalable and adaptive in terms of resource allocation. This paper contributes to the realization of a system design for multimedia communication applications that is scalable in terms of processing requirements and bandwidth consumption. The focus is on implementation strategies for making software implementations of video compression algorithms perform efficiently on different processor architectures. Three different implementations of a wavelet-based video codec are presented, each of which is targeted at a particular type of processor architecture. The performance of each of the three implementations is analysed for different processor platforms. Our results indicate that different implementations of performance-critical code is necessary in order to realize a video communication systems on different types of equipment.