Synchronization of distributed multimedia data in an application-specific manner

摘要

One of the distinctive features of multimedia systems is the wide range of applications they intend to cover, stretching the gamut from entertainment to life-critical applications such as real-time remote surgery. In the face of such a wide spectrum of applications, protocols used to deal with various issues in multimedia systems should be adaptable to the application. Synchronization is one of the key characteristics of a multimedia system. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for synchronization of distributed media data, the accuracy of which can be tailored to the intended application. The model is extended for both stored and live multimedia data. The synchronization mechanism we propose ensures synchronization for all possible temporal relations. The performance of our scheme is evaluated and some implementation issues are discussed.