CONTROL OF PERCEIVED QUALITY OF SERVICE IN MULTIMEDIA RETRIEVAL SERVICES - PREDICTION-BASED MECHANISM VS. COMPENSATION BUFFERS

In multimedia systems end-to-end delay jitter has a great impact on th e continuity of information playback. Therefore, it is necessary to in troduce appropriate mechanisms to compensate for delay variations, so that the intramedia and intermedia temporal relationships can be prese rved. In this paper, two methods for compensation of the network delay jitter in a distributed multimedia retrieval service are compared: th e first is based on prediction of the network delay jitter suffered by each information unit and retrieval time modification at the source s ite; the second is based on a compensation buffer at the destination s ite. Comparison is made by assuming a master/slave relationship betwee n the monomedia streams composing the multimedia data flow.