A multimedia synchronization model and its implementation in transport protocols

An implementation of a synchronization mechanism in transport protocol to support multimedia applications over a packet or cell switched network is proposed. In designing such a mechanism for practical use, ease of implementation and capability of handling random delay of packets are two key issues for success. Since the random delay of packet or cell switched networks makes synchronization among media more complicated after the transmission across the network, a model which considers the random transmission delay is hence required to specify the temporal relationship among media. Therefore, a real-time synchronization model is presented to satisfy this requirement in the paper. Based on the proposed synchronization model, a transport protocol, namely the multimedia synchronization transport protocol (MSTP), is designed and implemented. We have implemented a prototype system using the MSTP protocol and built a simulation system for the wide area network (WAN) environment in order to evaluate the performance of the MSTP protocol.