Causal Order Mechanisms Based on the Virtual Receiving Time in A Distributed Multimedia System

摘要

For a distributed multimedia system into which humans or devices are embedded, data is required to be transmitted and delivered in real time. Moreover, the delivery has to be ensured with causal order, otherwise, the confusing anomalies to the participants might happen. However, while a distributed multimedia system is running on WAN, especially with a large number of participating sites, the traditional mechanisms are not suitable to maintain the causality in real time due to the large message transmission latency in the network. In this paper, we propose the novel causal order mechanisms for ensuring the realtime causal consistency. The mechanisms use the virtual receiving time to reduce the amount of causal control information in each message and diminish the transmission overhead. Experimental results show that the mechanisms could damp the network latency effects and preserve the causal order consistency with the real-time requirement.