A new mechanism for achieving inter-stream synchronization in multimedia communication systems

The design of techniques for synchronizing multimedia data on top of a transport service is addressed in this paper. The authors develop a new class of synchronization mechanisms for multimedia communication which takes into account conditional dependencies among information units of a bundle (a set of streams grouped within the same temporal range). Conditional dependencies are specified as Boolean expressions on the information units identifiers and are added to the stream information units in order to express further constraints when delivering the streams. Conditional dependencies are used for expressing synchronization points among different streams (inter-stream synchronization). Different algorithms are introduced for implementing the inter-stream conditional dependencies and several simple examples illustrate the interest of the proposed inter-stream synchronization facility