Synchronization in a distributed hypermedia system

This paper presents a media synchronization scheme for multimedia communication in a stored, distributed and interactive environment. The scheme ensures the presentation schedule of the media by controlling times for requesting the data transfer of the different media streams and by providing suitable buffers at the receiver. Data can be requested well in advance to meet the presentation deadline, but the penalty for doing this is that a larger buffer is required. Experiments have shown that if the time at which retrieval requests are to be sent, which is called the control time in this paper, is accurately estimated, the synchronization scheme will work fairly well. Some results of experiments conducted to measure the control time and buffer size are presented and discussed, and further work is also highlighted