Multimedia group synchronization protocols for integrated services networks

Unlike traditional data traffic, real time multimedia traffic requires synchronization. Temporal relationships among media must be maintained. Yet delay jitter and the absence of a global clock may disrupt these temporal relationships. This paper introduces new group synchronization protocols for real-time, multimedia applications, including teleconference, teleorchestration and multimedia on demand services. The proposed protocols achieve synchronization for all configurations (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many), and does so without prior knowledge of the end-to-end delay distribution, or the distribution of the clock drift. The only a-priori knowledge the protocols require is an upper bound on the end-to-end delay. The paper concludes with simulation experiments showing that the protocols work effectively in both LAN and WAN environments.