A synchronization and compensation protocol for multimedia communication systems

Media synchronization and freedom from starvation at destination devices are the two most important problems in a multimedia communication system. In order to solve these problems at the same time, this paper presents a protocol combining the scheduling scheme and the buffering scheme with underflow threshold (SBUF). In this protocol, by controlling the buffer sizes and modifying transmission schedule of the synchronizer synchronization can be achieved without synchronizing clocks during a connection. In this paper the algorithm of the protocol is described. The setting of the system parameters and network QOS to support the proposed protocol are also given in this paper. A simulation is performed for comparison of four synchronization schemes: scheduling schemes (with and without clock synchronization), marker scheme, and the proposed SBUF protocol. The results confirm that the proposed protocol guarantees satisfaction of QOS requirements and also performs better than the other schemes in terms of media synchronization and freedom from starvation at destination devices