Design, development and assessment of control schemes for IDMS in a standardized RTCP-based solution

Currently, several media sharing applications that allow social interactions between distributed users are gaining momentum. In these networked scenarios, synchronized playout between the involved participants must be provided to enable truly interactive and coherent shared media experiences. This research topic is known as Inter-Destination Media Synchronization (IDMS). This paper presents the design and development of an advanced IDMS solution, which is based on extending the capabilities of RTP/RTCP standard protocols. Particularly, novel RTCP extensions, in combination with several control algorithms and adjustment techniques, have been specified to enable an adaptive, highly accurate and standard compliant IDMS solution. Moreover, as different control or architectural schemes for IDMS exist, and each one is best suited for specific use cases, the IDMS solution has been extended to be able to adopt each one of them. Simulation results prove the satisfactory responsiveness of our IDMS solution in a small scale scenario, as well as its consistent behavior, when using each one of the deployed architectural schemes.