Joint synchronization between live and stored media in multicast communications

For networked multimedia applications like distance learning in which a tutor explains the contents of a stored video stream to students with live voice and video streams, this paper proposes a joint synchronization mechanism between live and stored media. The mechanism makes the buffering time of stored media at each destination longer than that of live media. It also carries out retransmission control over stored media and group synchronization control, which adjusts the output timing among destinations in a multicast group. By experiment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism.