MULTIMEDIA GROUP SYNCHRONIZATION PROTOCOLS FOR INTEGRATED SERVICES NETWORKS

Unlike traditional data traffic, real time multimedia traffic requires synchronization. Temporal relationships among media must be maintaine d, Yet delay jitter and the absence of a global clock may disrupt thes e temporal relationships, This paper introduces new group synchronizat ion protocols for real time, multimedia applications, including teleco nference, teleorchestration and multimedia on demand services. The pro posed 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 distribu tion of the clock drift. The only a-priori knowledge the protocols req uire is an upper bound on the end-to-end delay, The paper concludes wi th simulation experiments showing that the protocols work effectively in both LAN and WAN environments.