A multicast multiple-stream multimedia presentation system over Internet

The characteristics of multicast communication and delivery of multiple media streams that exist in a distributed multimedia system induce many new problems. Two main problems are (i) multiple media streams, in which of them is multicasted via its dedicated transmission channel, make the synchronization problem complicated; (ii) end-users that are scattered on different LANs may have different network situations and may have different presentation considerations. To resolve the above two problems, a presentation system called Mcast that can achieve smooth multiple-stream multimedia presentations for heterogeneous clients is proposed and developed. In this paper, system modules of Mcast, including multicast communication architecture, and synchronization and presentation mechanisms are described. With the detailed description of system modules, this paper provides a feasible guideline for developers of multicast multiple-stream multimedia presentations.