Investigating a stream synchronization middleware for the NEES MAST system

This paper describes the streaming synchronization middleware research conducted while investigating how to provide a collaborative experimentation system for the NEES Multi-Axial Sub-Assemblage Testing (MAST) Experimental setup at the University of Minnesota. Continuous multimedia streams such as those produced by MAST experiments are characterized by well-defined temporal relationships between subsequent media units (MUs). The information present in these streams can only be presented correctly when these time-dependent relationships are maintained during presentation time. Even if these relationships change during transportation (e.g. due to network delays), they need to be reconstructed at the client (sink) before playout. Whereas most previous work addresses synchronization at the application level by modifying the end system, Our goal is to leave the endsystem largely unchange and simply add a new synchronization middleware application control system. This paper presents our three proposed algorithms that ensure the continuous and synchronous playback of distributed stored multimedia streams across a communications network via a middleware controlled commercial media player.