Synchronization and flow adaptation schemes for reliable multiple-stream transmission in multimedia presentations

In the practical networking environments, an orchestration of distributed multimedia presentation (DMP) with multiple media streams, e.g., WWW multimedia presentations over the Internet, is always disturbed due to the unpredictable end-to-end delay. Presentation adaptation associated with multimedia synchronization and flow control is a feasible solution to achieve a smooth multiple-stream DMP. In the paper, we propose the Pause-And-Run approach for k-stream (PARK) multimedia presentations over Internet to achieve reliable transmission of continuous media. Main characteristics of the PARK approach are as follows. (i) To achieve reliable transmission for continuous media, PARK adopts TCP instead of UDP. (ii) Since the slow-start scheme is embedded in TCP, a novel flow adaptation scheme is proposed to reduce the overhead of the network and end hosts. The server adapts its transmission rates to the buffer situation of the client and prevents the client's buffers from overflow and underflow as much as possible. (iii) With the provision of multiple-stream synchronization and the multi-level adaptation control, the client achieves smooth multimedia presentations and achieves graceful presentation degradation when the resources are insufficient. This paper shows the evaluation of applying the PARK approach over Internet. The evaluation results reveal a suitable buffering control policy for the audio and video media, respectively.