A multimedia synchronization protocol for ATM networks

The media streams of a multimedia communication application may traverse through different communication channels. Because of the network delay and jitter, data in these streams sent at the same time may not arrive at a destination simultaneously. In this paper a multimedia synchronization protocol that resynchronizes the media streams is proposed. The protocol inserts extra control cells into the media streams, and aligns the cells at the receiver site. Three synchronization policies, namely, the Drop-Old, the Transmit-Old and the Delayed-Transmit, are introduced to align the control cells. To satisfy the Quality of Service (QOS) specified by an application, the protocol must negotiate an appropriate QOS with the underlying ATM network. For each of the three synchronization policies, the relationship between the specified QOS and the negotiated QOS is derived.<
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