A synchronization paradigm with QoS guarantees for multimedia communications

We propose a synchronization paradigm, called SYNC*, offering two quality of service (QoS) requirements, skew and throughput, for multimedia communications, SYNC* is composed of three components: an intelligent video smoother (IVS), synchronizer, and multi-thread priority manager (MPM). While IVS and synchronizer achieves intramedia and intermedia synchronization, respectively, MPM ensures satisfactory throughput before playout. The main goal of the paper is to present in detail the design and performance analysis of the second component, the synchronizer. The synchronizer is aimed at achieving bounded skew between different media through periodic marking of correlated frames. The minimum marking interval yielding a given skew is analytically determined based on a Markov batch Bernoulli process (MBBP)/D/K/1 queueing model. We demonstrate the profound agreement between analytic and simulation results. The results also indicate that, the playout quality with respect to skew is highly relevant to the traffic burstiness and decoder buffer size. On the basis of a fixed marking interval, the greater the burstiness and buffer size, the poorer the playout quality.