FLOW SYNCHRONIZATION PROTOCOL

We present an adaptive how synchronization protocol that permits synchronized delivery of data to and from geographically distributed sites. Applications include inter-stream synchronization, synchronized delivery of information in a multisite conference, and synchronization for concurrency control in distributed computations. The contributions of this protocol in the area of flow synchronization are the ability to synchronize over arbitrary topologies, the introduction of an adaptive synchronization delay, the flexibility to maintain multiple synchronization groups, and the use of a modular architecture that permits the application to tailor synchronization calculations to its service requirements. We take advantage of network protocols capable of maintaining network clock synchronization in the millisecond range.