Media Streams Scheduling for Synchronization in Distributed Multimedia Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of multimedia synchronization based on scheduling the transmission of multimedia documents in a networked environment. Assuming channels with different bandwidth and delay characteristics are established between the multimedia server and the client, we formulate the scheduling problem to ensure interstream and intrastream synchronization as a parallel processor scheduling problem. Since the heterogeneous parallel processor scheduling problem is NP-hard, we propose two heuristic algorithms with time complexity ofO(nlogn+nm), wherenis the number of data units to be scheduled andmthe number of channels available. We also develop an enumerative algorithm to obtain the exact solutions. Extensive computational simulations reveal that the heuristics consistently obtain near-optimal solutions. From the simulation results, we also identify special structures of multimedia documents along with characteristics of the available channels which affect the relative performance of the algorithms.