Towards multimedia communication services

A set of basic synchronization facilities is identified that can be expected from a general-purpose, multimedia communication service. Formalization relies on the concept of temporal signature previously introduced for characterizing the temporal properties of multimedia streams. The authors discuss several mechanisms related to temporal signature preservation. Dependency relationships among the delivered information units are further considered. The authors propose a set of service primitives, which may be seen as a first step in the definition of a synchronization layer on top of a transport service