Distributed, networked multimedia information systems are expected to play a major role in the information age of today. Presentation of multimedia information requires temporal synchronization within and among different objects. Network heterogeneity, resource constraints, and random traffic characteristics necessitate intelligent mechanisms for synchronized presentation of multimedia data in distributed multimedia systems. The computational complexity of any such synchronization method has to be small for real-time presentation. The authors use intelligent scheduling procedures to guarantee intra-stream and inter-stream synchronization under network resource constraints. They use the notion of quality of presentation for multimedia data to evaluate the effectiveness of these scheduling algorithms for different resource instances. They present two low complexity (O(n log n), where n is the total number of multimedia presentation units to be scheduled) heuristic scheduling algorithms for real-time applications. They have implemented these algorithms on an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network testbed and discuss their performance with respect to two different quality parameters.
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