Synchronization of Multimedia Streams in Distributed Environments

One of the major features that distinguishes multimedia applications from other traditional applications is the integration of various media streams that have to be presented in a synchronized fashion. This paper presents a set of synchronization algorithms for continuous media streams in a distributed best-eeort system. First, we show how the load variation at the source may lead to an erroneous synchronization speciication, and how the display time aaects the the presentation of the frames. Second, we introduce an adap-tive lip-synchronization algorithm that is robust in the presence of network and CPU load variations, and extend it for the general case of n continuous streams that have the same or diierent sources. A direct application of our research is the Interactive Remote Instruction (IRI) project 1 , which requires synchronization algorithms in a distance learning environment where participants use best-eeort operating systems and networks.