SMART: a synchronization scheme for providing multimedia quality in emerging wireless Internet

In this paper, we present a novel synchronization scheme for multimedia applications that can provide high quality playback performance in emerging wireless environments. Because of the increasing size of global networks and the integration of wireless services, end-to-end delays are gradually increasing. Under these new conditions the existing synchronization schemes based on feedback, can no longer provide the necessary synchronization and thus quality needed for multimedia applications. We propose a novel synchronization scheme that requires no feedback, and which at the same time minimizes the required buffer space. We show that the proposed scheme performs very well, while significantly reducing communication overhead due to the control scheme by removing the feedback loop. Moreover, as its minimal buffer requirements are independent of network delays, the proposed scheme is inherently scalable for the evolving wireless environments.