Patent ID: 7096471

Claim:
An apparatus for allocating processing resources of a signal processor to signal processing functions, which are associated with inputted signals, comprising: a capacity determining means for determining an amount of the processor resources available to be assigned to the signal processing functions; a load determining means for determining an estimate of an amount of the processing resources needed for each of the signal processing functions waiting in a queue to be executed; an allocating means, which receives information from said capacity determining means and said load determining means, for allocating the available processing resources to signal processing functions waiting in the queue to be executed, based on a hierarchical priority scheme, wherein said load determining means calculates a product, for each of j instances, corresponding to each of said inputted signals, where j=1 to m, and for each of k signal processing functions associated with each of said j instances, where k=1 to N, obtained by: (a) estimating an amount of processing resource needed to support the execution of the j th instance of the k th signal processing function; (b) assigning a value of either zero or one to a multiplicand associated with the j th instance of the k th signal processing function; and (c) multiplying the estimated amount of processing resource needed to support the execution of the j th instance of the k th signal processing function by its associated multiplicand and assigning the result to the product associated with the j th instance of the k th signal processing function; and said load determining means calculates a sub-total sum, for each of the j instances, obtained by: (d) summing together the products associated with each of the k signal processing functions associated with each of the j instances; and (e) adding another estimated amount of the processing resource needed to support background processing associated with each of the j instances to the sum of products of each of the k signal processing functions associated with each of the j instances and assigning the result to the sub-total for each of the j instances.