Performance analysis of synchronization communication protocols for real-time multimedia services

Synchronisation has an important role in maintaining the quality of service (QoS) of multimedia services transmitted over broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). In the real-time delivery of multimedia data streams over networks, the interruption of continuity in a single media stream and the mismatching of the data within the same time interval in multimedia data streams transferred in parallel on different channels are considered as the most serious synchronization problems. To handle those problems, several mechanisms such as synchronization marker, synchronization channel, and segmentation method are proposed. Those mechanisms are analyzed and compared by computer simulation. According to the simulation results, it is shown that not only the the segmentation method but also the synchronization channel method are superior to the synchronization marker method in view of the real-time transmission and quality of service. However, the segmentation method is superior to the synchronization channel method with respect to channel utilization.