Rapid synchronization of RTP multicast sessions

Quality of Service (QoS) is an important, and admittedly overloaded, concept for emerging services based on the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) to deliver multimedia content. In the context of the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services, the synchronization of multimedia components plays an important role. In order to synchronize audio and video components of multimedia content, RTP timestamps have to be related. Periodic Real-Time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP) Sender Report (SR) packets, which associate the RTP timestamps in the stream with a common clock at the transmitter, are associated with each stream. Thus, the frequency and the timing of the RTCP SR packets often contribute to the delay before audio and video are rendered, not just to their synchronization, because many clients will not render anything before the synchronization has been established. This paper elaborates on the different concepts for isolation of the RTCP SR packets from the RTP data flow in order to ensure the synchronization delay of the multicast multimedia sessions sufficient for lip-synchronization without excessive delay regardless of network congestion.