Inter-destination Synchronization : A Comparison between Master-Slave and Synchronization-Manager Techniques

Abstract

With advancements in communication and the internet, Synchronous shared experience has emerged as a field of interest for researchers and scientists. The inter-destination synchronization mechanism is a fundamental requirement of synchronous shared experience. Inter-destination synchronization has been studied in the perspective of stream-based media, which does not work well with the group of participants with varied bandwidth and computing resources. Document-based media provides functionality of alternative content selection on bases of available resource, which made it a potential solution for inter-destination synchronization when participants of synchronous shared experience have varied bandwidth and computing resources.In this research work, we adopted two of the stream based inter-destination synchronization techniques to work with document-based media. We implemented, evaluated and compared the results of master-slave and synchronization-manager techniques. For both techniques, the play-out differences are within an acceptable range. However, the synchronization-manager technique performed better than the master-slave technique. Finally, we extended inter-destination synchronization techniques to synchronize user interaction actions across distributed participants