Smooth control of Adaptive Media Playout to acquire IDMS in cluster-based applications

Many emerging multimedia applications enable independent groups (or clusters) of consumers to interact between them and share services within the context of simultaneous media content consumption. Owing to the semantic, spatial or temporal dependency among the involved media streams, concurrently synchronized playout points must be ensured so as not to spoil the user experience on such interaction. This paper presents the combination of an evolved Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization (IDMS) approach and a new designed Adaptive Media Playout (AMP) scheme that aims to smoothly adjust the playout timing of each one of the receivers in a specific cluster, if an asynchrony threshold between their playout states is exceeded. Simulation results prove the feasibility of such proposals, by employing several dynamic master selection policies, to maintain an overall synchronization status (within allowable limits) in each cluster, while minimizing the occurrence of long-term playout discontinuities (such as skips/pauses) which are subjectively more annoying to users than small variations in the media playout rate.