A client-driven media synchronization mechanism for RTP packet-based video streaming

Media synchronization is used to correctly playback a video stream with its associated audio. To support synchronization between video and audio streams transported over IP networks, an RTP/RTCP protocol suite is usually employed. In conventional server-driven media synchronization, the server needs to periodically transmit an RTCP sender report (SR) packet to provide the client with a UTC time in NTP format corresponding to the RTP timestamp carried by each RTP packet. In this paper, we propose a precise client-driven media synchronization mechanism for an RTP packet-based multimedia streaming service. In the proposed method, the server does not need to send any RTCP SR packets for synchronization. Instead, the client device derives the precise normal play time (NPT) for each video and audio stream from the received RTP packets containing an RTP timestamp. Simulations show that the proposed client-driven synchronization method can provide accurate media synchronization without employing an RTCP SR packet and accordingly reduce the initial synchronization delay, the processing complexity at the client device, the number of required user datagram protocol ports, and the amount of control traffic injected into the network.