Multi-constraints self-adaptation for reconfigurable multimedia embedded systems

The application of multimedia in embedded systems (ES), such as Virtual reality and 3-D imaging, represents the current trend in ES development. Coupling multimedia with ES has raised new multimedia-related challenges that have been added to the common ES constraints. These challenges deal with the real-time, quality, performance and efficient processing requirements of multimedia applications. The integration of self-adaptation in ES development has been, for many years, a paramount solution to cope with these issues. Although there has been extensive research on the topic of ES self-adaptation, the related works still lack global approaches that better deal with multimedia-related constraints. Coordinating different adaptation mechanisms, monitoring multiple system constraints and supporting multi-application contexts are still underexplored. The aim of the present work is to fill in these gaps by providing a global adaptation approach that offers better adaptation decisions with fair resource sharing among competing multimedia applications. With the above challenges in mind, we propose a multi-constraints combined adaptation approach that targets multimedia ES. It addresses four critical system constraints: maximizing the overall system's Quality of Application (QoA) under the real-time constraint, the remaining system energy and the available network bandwidth. It coordinates the adaptation at both application and architecture levels. To test and validate the proposed technique, a videophone system is designed on a Xilinx FPGA development board. It executes two complex multimedia applications. The validation results show the aptitude of the proposed system to successfully reconfigure itself at run-time in response to its constraints.