Developing multicast, multiple-stream, multimedia presentations using a formal approach

The Internet explosion is driving the need for multicasting, multiple-stream, multimedia presentations, e.g. media distribution and virtual classroom. The jitter phenomenon over the Internet always disturbs the orchestration of multimedia presentations. Multimedia synchronisation is one of the important techniques used to compensate for jitter anomalies. However, the characteristics of the multiple-media streams forming the multicast delivery complicate the multimedia synchronisation problem. Therefore a formal synchronisation definition and specification model that can accurately specify temporal relationships between multiple-media streams has to be devised first. In the paper, the primary issues for ensuring smooth multiple-stream multimedia presentations in the multicast environment are identified, and a formal definition mechanism to specify the related attributes of a multimedia presentation is proposed. Finally, an extended finite state machines-based model is proposed to specify formally the temporal synchronisation of multicast multimedia presentations. Based on the proposed model, a communication engine for multicasting multiple streams is developed. The communication engine can achieve smooth multimedia presentations and is the middleware for multicasting, multiple-stream, multimedia applications.