Synchronization and flow adaptation schemes for reliable multiple-stream transmission in multimedia presentations

In the practical networking environments, an orchestration of distributed m ultimedia presentation (DMP) with multiple media streams, e.g., WWW multime dia presentations over the Internet, is always disturbed due to the unpredi ctable end-to-end delay. Presentation adaptation associated with multimedia synchronization and flow control is a feasible solution to achieve a smoot h multiple-stream DMP. In the paper, we propose the Pause-And-Run approach for k-stream (PARK) multimedia presentations over Internet to achieve relia ble transmission of continuous media. Main characteristics of the PARK appr oach are as follows. (i) To achieve reliable transmission for continuous me dia, PARK adopts TCP instead of UDP. (ii) Since the slow-start scheme is em bedded in TCP, a novel flow adaptation scheme is proposed to reduce the ove rhead of the network and end hosts. The server adapts its transmission rate s to the buffer situation of the client and prevents the client's buffers f rom overflow and underflow as much as possible. (iii) With the provision of multiple-stream synchronization and the multi-level adaptation control, th e client achieves smooth multimedia presentations and achieves graceful pre sentation degradation when the resources are insufficient. This paper shows the evaluation of applying the PARK approach over Internet. The evaluation results reveal a suitable buffering control policy for the audio and video media, respectively. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.