On the synchronization mechanisms for multimedia integrated services networks

Abstract

With the advance of communication technology, integrated services networks make possible real-time, multimedia applications. Unlike traditional data traffic, real-time multimedia traffic requires synchronization; temporal relationships among media must be maintained. Yet delay jitter and the absence of a global clock may disrupt these temporal relationships. This paper introduces new group synchronization protocols for real-time, multimedia apphcations, including teleconference, teleorchestration and multimedia on-demand services. The proposed protocols achieve synchronization for all configurations (one-to-one, one-tomany, many-to-one, and many-to-many), and it does so without prior knowledge of the end-to-end delay distribution, or the distribution of the clock drift. The only a-priori knowledge the protocols require is an upper bound on the end-to-end delay. The paper concludes with simulation experiments showing that the mechanisms work effectively in both LAN and WAN environments.