Temporal control specifications and mechanisms for multimedia multicast communication services

Abstract

The Internet explosion impels the extensive demands for distributed multimedia presentations (DMPs), which provide multiple users with QoS-controlled multimedia services under multicast communications, such as media distribution and virtual classroom. In this paper, we (i) identify the primary issues for ensuring smooth multiple-stream multimedia presentations in the multicast environment, (ii) propose a formal temporal definition to specify related attributes of a multimedia presentation, and (iii) propose a temporal control mechanism to achieve the temporal synchronization of multicast multimedia presentations. Based on the proposed temporal definition and control mechanism, a multimedia middleware for multicasting multiple streams is developed. The multimedia middleware is named TVMS (The Viusal Multicast Systems), which (i) provides a flexible authoring tool to allow users to author a multiple-stream multimedia presentation in a multicast environment and (ii) achieves smooth multimedia presentations.