Synchronizing multimedia flows in active-high-speed networks

The main requirement of multimedia stream transfer is to guarantee the quality of service contracted between the user and the network. We are particularly interested by the synchronization constraints between different data streams flowing through a high-speed network. Our approach aims to regulate the streams progress reducing the gap observed between these streams and assuming that intermediate nodes in the network are capable of performing appropriate procedures that can be pre-defined by the user and the network manager. This intelligence allows the network nodes to manage the data streams, unlike passive carriers, by accelerating data units arriving after critical delays. We particularly address the case of active-ATM technologies and define for this purpose the active-ATM architecture that is needed for multimedia flow synchronization.