An Asymmetric Mechanism to Synchronize Continuous Media in Mobile Distributed Systems

The preservation of temporal dependencies at runtime among continuous media for mobile distributed systems (MDS) is a key issue for emerging mobile applications, such as medical signal monitoring and interactive multiuser games. The preservation of temporal dependencies among continuous media and simultaneous mobile distributed sources is an open research problem. This paper proposes a temporal synchronization mechanism to be used at runtime in a MDS. The synchronization mechanism avoids the use of a common reference by executing temporal dependencies according to the causal dependencies of the continuous media data. Our mechanism is efficient in terms of processing and storage capacities used at the mobile devices, as well as the overhead attached per message across the wired and wireless communication channels.