A SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT BUS MANAGEMENT SCHEME THAT SUPPORTS CONTINUOUSSTREAMS

An efficient bandwidth management and access arbitration scheme for an I/O bus in a multimedia workstation is presented. It assumes that a m ultimedia workstation consists of a number of processing modules which are interconnected by a packet bus. The scheme is efficient in the se nse 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 p rovided to show that the scheme is practical. Finally, the performance of this scheme is compared with alternative solutions through simulat ion.