Specification of synchronization requirements for distributed multimedia systems

The field of distributed multimedia systems (DMS) has received a great deal of attention. Multimedia synchronization specification is an important issue in DMS since it must be addressed in the first phase of the development lifecycle. This paper presents a classification of multimedia application requirements and a comprehensive comparison of various Petri net models that have been proposed for the specification of synchronization requirements in DMS. The Petri net models in the comparison include the object composition Petri net, extended object composition Petri net, dynamic time Petri net, the original time stream Petri net, and a new extension to the time stream Petri net model that supports the description of user interactions. The comparison is based on the specifications of a simple, illustrative multimedia synchronization example.