Impact of CPU reservation on end-to-end media data transmission

Current distributed multimedia applications usually use either best-effort or reservation-based network bandwidth allocation for media data transmission. We argue that end-system CPU reservation also plays an important role in media data transport. We present an analysis of the impact of CPU reservation on media data transmission tasks and its integration with the network bandwidth reservation mechanism. The underlying transport protocols considered are TCP and UDP, supporting flows over RSVP-capable networks. The integration comes together in a QoS-aware communication broker architecture which considers both CPU and network bandwidth reservation for media data transport. Our results show that the reservation of CPU for multimedia transmission tasks at end systems needs to be an integral part of the end-to-end resource management framework, in order to provide end-to-end QoS guarantees. Experiments on a prototype system with CPU reservation for transmission tasks show substantial improvement in the performance and service quality of media data transport, relative to its performance in the absence of CPU reservation. In the absence of CPU reservation, media data transport can exhibit non-trivial performance and QoS degradation, even in the presence of end-to-end bandwidth guarantees.