Synchronization and handoff management schemes for wireless multimedia systems

This paper presents handoff management schemes for synchronization algorithms for wireless multimedia systems. The synchronization and handoff management schemes allow mobile hosts to receive time-dependant multimedia streams without delivery interruption while moving from one cell to another. They also maintain the correct ordering of the media components, through the execution of the wireless multimedia application by a means of timestamped messages passed among mobile hosts, base stations and servers. The timestamp values are used to compute the delay for each multimedia unit for each server. Furthermore, the proposed schemes always search for a quasi-receiver among the base stations with which the mobile hosts can communicate to synchronize multimedia units. We discuss the algorithms and present a set of simulation experiments that evaluate the performance of our schemes, using message complexity and buffer usage at each frame arrival time. Our results indicate that our schemes exhibit no underflow or overflow within the bounded delivery time.