SYNCHRONISATION ISSUES IN POINT - TO - POINT MULTI MEDIA COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Multimedia communication is the growing need of industry, modern, education and information technology. Multimedia communication system will carry all related information from one place to other and present it at receiver, preserving temporal relation among the various media. Different media (like audio, data etc.) have specific QOS (Quality of Service) requirements. Therefore, those media (like audio) which can tolerate losses may be sent using an unreliable protocol which is less costly and gives better delay performance. The underlying network provides delay, jitter, and drops. Different packets may follows different routes and may reach out-of-sequence at receiver, thus creating a need for receiver to do sequencing. Therefore, multimedia communication needs synchronisation mechanism which preserves the temporal position of different media while presenting at the receiver. It involves synchronisation within the stream and among different streams. In this dissertation work, a mechanism is implemented which synchronises two streams consisting of audio and data. In this mechanism, considering the characteristics of media, the time sense from reference (audio) stream is derived and a control stream (packets) is generated at source and is sent using reliable protocol. The receiver locks to this stream and reproduces audio and data stream preserving their temporal position.