Scheduling Multimedia Traffic on IPV6 Enabled Real Time Linux Operating System

Abstract

Multimedia traffics are beginning to conquer computer networks. This thesis investigates into the scheduling aspects of real time multimedia streams with a real time test-bed environment. This will include the Operating System Scheduling Issues, as well as Routing at the Network Layer.

The architecture configured for the project work has been put forward with intricately defined requirements for each component. An Ipv6 enabled distributed system is designed for priority based scheduling of Multimedia stream generated by VLC’s VideoLAN Software. The traffic is further routed based on Quality of Service requirements, through software based IP Router. The software router is configured to run on the Real Time kernel (RTLinux3.1). Out of the two software based routers (Zebra and XORP), which was configured and studied, XORP was selected was the project work, due to its extensibility and robustness. As compared to conventional hardware based routers, which are generally not open systems, XORP can be used as a router and can be extended through new XORP Processes, to implement new routing protocols, which can be integrated and tested in real time working environment.

The Forwarding Plane of the XORP Router uses the internal file structures like routing table of Linux kernel; hence the thesis work also deals with OS Kernel level Scheduling mechanisms.

Another aspect of the project work is QoS based scheduling of the multimedia traffic. This is because; the Multimedia Applications must adhere to stringent real-time constraints and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Therefore, a DiffServ based, QoS management approach is developed to orchestrate and guarantee the timely interaction between such applications and services. In this context, a kernel level module is developed to parse the network packets and identify the DSCP value, which is marked during multimedia streaming at the source. The further scheduling of the traffic is implemented based on this. The report also covers; several other approaches that can be implemented for QoS based scheduling of multimedia traffic.