Meeting the strict real-time requirements of distributed continuous multimedia applications

In this paper we discuss synchronization techniques-and specifically their implementation at the hardware, operating system and high-level language levels-that can be used to achieve deadline satisfaction. In particular, it is shown that by endowing process control computers with fully parallel input and output mechanisms making use of exact time specifications, synchronization and deadline satisfaction can be achieved at the same time without any jitter. Continuous multimedia applications require accurate synchronization of the clocks in different processors. The available solutions have considerable accuracy or applicability. Local clock synchronization by radio transmitted time information turns out to be the only general purpose and high accuracy technique that is applicable with reasonable effort