Abstract
In distributed multimedia synchronization involving asynchronous communication with heterogeneous sources and media, not all media segments have a priori known presentation-time durations. To deal with the temporal uncertainty, this paper presents a new temporal Petri net model for distributed multimedia synchronization that can handle uncertain or fuzzy temporal requirements. This model is called Extended Fuzzy Timing Net (EFTN) model for distributed multimedia synchronization and is an integration of Murata-Zhou's Fuzzy Timing Petri Net, and Merlin's Time Petri Net. EFTNs are powerful and flexible on modeling distributed multimedia synchronization. We present techniques to construct a fine-grained EFTN model supporting fuzzy scenarios, starting from a set of relative temporal relations among multimedia objects specified by the authors of multimedia applications. Also, an important issue in distributed multimedia synchronization is to check whether Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements are satisfied in the scenario. Based on EFTN modeling, we discuss techniques to analyze possibilities of satisfying QoS requirements. To illustrate our techniques, we give an example of computing the possibilities of satisfying maximum tolerable skew between streams in fine-grained distributed multimedia synchronization.