An optimized concurrent network system software supporting effective multi-session streaming in a multimedia appliance

This paper describes an effective concurrent network system software architecture for a high-throughput multi-session streaming service with an appliance. The in-home streaming service is emerging in-home network environments, but concurrent-processing performance of the general communication system software is not enough to guarantee the deterministic transmission quality for high-throughput multi-session streaming service with common consumer appliances. In order to maximize concurrency of the multi-streaming applications, this paper proposes packet magazine (PM) software architecture for the high-throughput multi-session streaming service with the general operating system and the network adapter. The PM handles a series of data structures of packets and descriptors in the application, for both minimizing the unpredictable processing time inside a kernel (device driver) and maximizing concurrency of the multi-session streaming process. The proposed concept also aims to strengthen the application program's role in the streaming process by assigning the responsibility of the transmission-buffer management. The proposed idea is experimentally verified with an IEEE1394-based multimedia streaming test-bed network. The results show that the optimized concurrent software with general purpose hardware can guarantee the deterministic quality for multi-session streaming service.