Adaptive versus Reservation-Based Synchronization Protocols—Analysis and Comparison

With the expansion of distributed multimedia applications, such as video-phone, video-conference, and video-on-demand, synchronization among various media (time-dependent, time-independent) becomes an integral part of various protocols, mechanisms and services in the underlying computing and communication systems. The current systems allow and provide two different resource management environments where synchronization will be considered: (1) best effort resource management, and (2) reservation-based resource management with differentiation of service classes. Under these two resource management environments, our goal is to analyze and compare the design, implementation, and performance of synchronization protocols and services. Our approach to accomplish this complex analysis is inductive, because we select a representative protocol from each group, and consider an adaptive synchronization protocol on top of the best effort resource management and a reservation-based synchronization protocol on top of the reservation-based resource management. We believe that both protocols include a rich set of known synchronization algorithms and mechanisms, hence our resulting analysis and comparison show: (1) trade-offs/difference in design complexity of the synchronization protocols (space and time), (2) trade-offs/difference in implementation complexity of the synchronization protocols (space and time), and (3) magnitude of performance changes.