An efficient synchronization scheme of multimedia streams in wireless and mobile systems

Recent advances in mobile computing and distributed multimedia systems allow mobile hosts (clients) to access wireless multimedia systems anywhere and at anytime, but not without creating a new set of issues and trade-offs. To the best of our knowledge, there has been very little research in dealing with the synchronization problem in wireless and mobile multimedia systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient distributed synchronization algorithm using quasi-sink for wireless and mobile multimedia systems to ensure and facilitate mobile client access to multimedia objects. We discuss the algorithm and provide its proof of correctness. We also present a set of simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our scheme using message complexity and buffer usage at each frame arrival time. Our results indicate that our scheme exhibits a significant low message complexity and no underflow and overflow within the bounded delivery time.