Inter-Destination Synchronization Schemes for Continuous Media Multicasting: An Application-Level QoS Comparison in Hierarchical Networks

This paper presents an application-level QoS comparison of three inter-destination synchronization schemes: the master-slave destination scheme, the synchronization maestro scheme, and the distributed control scheme. The inter-destination synchronization adjusts the output timing among destinations in a multicast group for live audio and video streaming over the Internet/intranets. We compare the application-level QoS of these schemes by simulation with the Tiers model, which is a sophisticated network topology model and reflects hierarchical structure of the Internet. The comparison clarifies their features and finds the best scheme in the environment. The simulation result shows that the distributed control scheme provides the highest quality of inter-destination synchronization among the three schemes in heavily loaded networks, while in lightly loaded networks the other schemes can have almost the same quality as that of the distributed control scheme. key words: multicast, live media, media synchronization, inter-destination synchronization, QoS