Design of multimedia stream channel arbiter in home network gateway

In a multimedia environment composed of various analog and digital devices, such as a home network, the performance and role of the gateway responsible for efficient data transfer between devices, as well as between the device and the internet, is becoming increasingly important. In particular, from inside the gateway, the effective arbitration among multi-channel stream data that are transmitted simultaneously will directly influence data delivery efficiency. In this paper, we propose MSCA (Multimedia Stream Channel Arbiter) that arbitrates the multiple multimedia stream channels needed inside the gateway. MSCA consists of several hardware components and arbitrates multiple MSD (Multimedia Stream Data) that have various characteristics in real time. In addition, MSCA has high practicality of communication among bus, memory and peripheral devices via DMA or stream buffers. Implementation and evaluation of MSCA confirms its good performance in stream packet arbitration. MSCA is suitable for the FPGA or ASIC design in terms of circuit size.¹.