A group synchronization mechanism for stored media in multicast communications

This paper proposes a group synchronization mechanism, which synchronizes slave destinations with the master destination, for stored media in multicast communications. At the master and slave destinations, intra-stream and inter-stream synchronization mechanisms which were proposed by the authors are employed to output the master media stream and slave media streams synchronously. We achieve group synchronization by adjusting the output timing of the master media stream at each slave destination to that at the master destination. We also deal with traffic control by media scaling and control of joining an in-progress multicast group. Furthermore, the paper presents experimental results using an ATM network. It shows the validity of the mechanism and illustrates the influence of parameters on the system performance