Efficient Token Flow Design for the MPEG RMC Framework

This paper proposes an efficient token flow design methodology for a decoder in the MPEG Reconfigurable Media Coding (RMC) framework. The MPEG RMC framework facilitates a decoder to be configured with a set of modules called functional units (FUs) that are connected by tokens. Such a modular design philosophy of the MPEG RMC framework enables the reusability and reconfigurability of FUs. One drawback of the MPEG RMC framework is that the decoder performance can be affected by increasing the token transmissions between FUs. The proposed method improves the design of the FU network in the RMC framework toward real-time decoder implementation. In the proposed method, the merging of FU, the separation of token flow, and the merging of token transactions are applied to minimize the token traffic between FUs. The experimental results of the MPEG-4 SP decoder show that the proposed method reduces the total decoding time by up to 77 percent compared to the design of the RMC simulation model.