Multi-Source Latency Variation Synchronization for Collaborative Applications

Various distributed multi-source applications such as 3D Virtual Immersive Systems (3DVIS), 2D/3D Videoconferencing, Multi-party games, etc. require the construction of a multicast overlay through which the video blocks are streamed from source to receiver. The most general multicast model involves a single source and a set of receiver nodes also known as multicast set with a single stream to each receiver. In this paper, we are interested to investigate a different multicast model consisting of multiple sources and receivers which is quite common in 3DVIS/video conferencing applications where each node serves both as a source and a receiver. The problem of constructing a multicast overlay for multi-source is hard and we are interested to guarantee certain QoS constraints such as end-to-end latency and latency variations. Latency variation constraints are very important in collaborative applications for maintaining realtime interactivity and multi-stream synchronization. We present an efficient heuristic solution for the muti-source multicast construction problem with an economical time-complexity.