MoSync: A synchronization scheme for cellular wireless and mobile multimedia systems

The advances in mobile computing and distributed multimedia systems allow mobile hosts (clients) to access wireless multimedia systems anywhere at anytime, but not without creating a new set of issues and trade-offs. To the best of our knowledge, there has been very little research done to deal with the synchronization problem in wireless and mobile multimedia systems. We propose an efficient distributed synchronization algorithm for wireless and mobile multimedia systems to ensure and facilitate mobile clients' access of multimedia objects. We describe our synchronization scheme, which we refer to as MoSync, its implementation, and report on the performance results that we have obtained using a discrete event simulation testbed we have developed. Our results indicate clearly that our synchronization scheme is a viable approach to a wireless multimedia environment.