A Temporal Synchronization Mechanism for Real-Time Distributed Continuous Media

The preservation of temporal relations for real-time distributed continuos media is a key issue for emerging multimedia applications, such as Tele-Immersion and Tele-Engineering. Although several works try to model and execute distributed continuous media scenarios, they are far from resolving the problem. The present paper proposes a viable solution based on the identification of logical dependencies. Our solution considers two main components. First, it establishes a temporal synchronization model that expresses all possible temporal scenarios for continuous media according to their causal dependency constraints. The second component consists of an innovative synchronization mechanism that accomplishes the reproduction of continuous media according to its temporal specification. We note that the present work does not require previous knowledge of when nor for how long the continuous media of a temporal scenario is