A performance comparison of media synchronization schemes for collaborative systems in an interconnected ATM-wireless LAN

This paper makes an experimental comparison of performance among six media synchronization schemes in collaborative systems, where drawing on a shared window, voice and video streams need to be synchronized with each other. Five of the six schemes are based on the virtual-time rendering (VTR) algorithm proposed by the authors, and they differ from each other in the relation between master and slave streams. The remaining one employs another algorithm. In our experimental system using an interconnected ATM-wireless LAN, live drawing, voice and video input at a source workstation are transferred separately, and then they are synchronized and output at a destination workstation. This paper also presents the system performance such as mean square error of inter-stream synchronization and average delay time. In addition, we examine the effect of intra-stream and inter-stream synchronization control on the performance.