A simple and efficient bus management scheme that supports continuous streams

An efficient bandwidth management and access arbitration scheme for an I/O bus in a multimedia workstation is presented. It assumes that a multimedia workstation consists of a number of processing modules which are interconnected by a packet bus. The scheme is efficient in the sense that it allows the bus to support both continuous media transfers and regular random transactions in such a way that continuous streams can meet their real-time constraints independently of random traffic, and random traffic is not delayed significantly by continuous traffic except when traffic load is very high. Implementation guidelines are provided to show that the scheme is practical. Finally, the performance of this scheme is compared with alternative solutions through simulation.