QUALITY-BASED EVALUATION OF MULTIMEDIA SYNCHRONIZATION PROTOCOLS FOR DISTRIBUTED MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

Distributed, networked multimedia information systems will be a critic al component of technology-based information infra-structures in the f uture, In this paper, we present an infrastructure for supporting mult imedia applications, We discuss various characteristics of multimedia data and the effect of the network on required quality of presentation for multimedia data, We present a suite of synchronization protocols to support quality of presentation. The crux of these protocols is the scheduling of multimedia information for synchronized delivery, over broadband networks with limited resources, and is identified as an NP- hard problem, We introduce two parameters which can be used to measure the performance of end-to-end synchronization protocols in a network supporting distributed multimedia applications, We propose and impleme nt several heuristic scheduling algorithms, and compare their performa nce, We deduce the appropriateness of these algorithms in different ty pes of distributed multimedia environments.