Managing isochronous processes in a heterogenous work environment

Abstract

In a heterogeneuos work environment a method and apparatus for managing isochronous streaming servers is disclosed. This includes a mechanism for allocating processor resource to streaming servers at admission control time with respect to the business importance of work they will be running. This mechanism includes a provision to preempt currently running streaming work of lesser business importance in order to allocate its share of the processor to the new higher importance work. Also included is a mechanism to resume the server when a running stream terminated and processor becomes available. In the case of the variable bit rate multiple peak problem a mechanism is presented to preempt running streaming work at the lowest business importance so that higher priority work can continue to run unaffected. The mechanism to resume paused streams at the termination of a stream also restarts this work. In this way streaming work is never degraded so as to become unintelligible due to processor constraints but either runs correctly or is paused/terminated. Also presented is a method of combining a queuing model, admission control, process management and preemption/resumption services to allow a generic streaming service or isochronous process to be integrated into a heterogeneous work environment on a particular platform.