Reactive Process Networks
Data flow process networks are a good model of computation
for streaming multimedia applications incorporating audio,
video and/or graphics streams. Process networks are concurrent processes communicating streams of data through
FIFO channels. They can be executed e±ciently and de-erminately on multiprocessor platforms. However, such
stream processing applications are becoming more dynamic,
often requiring run-time recon¯gurations. Moreover, stream
processing is not always an application on its own, but may
be a component of a larger application. This application,
e.g. a game application, may be control oriented and event
driven; events may interact with the streaming component
and (re)connfigure it. In order to capture the interaction
between reactive and streaming components as well as reconconfiguration in dynamic stream processing, we introduce in
this paper a formal, operational and compositional semantics of so-called reactive process networks. This operational
semantics can serve as the basis for programming models
that allow the programming of streaming components interacting with reactive system components and their reconfigurations. It also supports the construction of analysis
and synthesis tools for dynamic streaming multimedia applications. It allows the integration of reactive behaviour in
process networks as general as Kahn process networks, but
it is also suitable for more restricted and e±cient classes of
process networks.
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Reactive Process Networks.
M.C.W. Geilen and T. Basten.
To appear in Embedded Software, Fourth ACM International Conference, EMSOFT 2004, Proceedings. Pisa, Italy, 27-29 September, 2004. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2004. (abstract, pdf)
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