LSync: A Universal Event-synchronizing Solution for Live Streaming

Abstract

The widespread of smart devices and the development of mobile networks bring the growing popularity of live streaming services worldwide. In addition to the video and audio transmission, a lot more media content is sent to the audiences as well, including player statistics for a sports stream, subtitles for living news, etc. However, due to the diverse transmission process between live streams and other media content, the synchronization of them has grown to be a great challenge. Unfortunately, the existing commercial solutions are not universal, which require specific server cloud services or CDN and limit the users’ free choices of web infrastructures. To address the issue, we propose a lightweight universal event-synchronizing solution for live streaming, called LSync, which inserts a series of audio signals containing metadata into the original audio stream. It brings no modification to the original live broadcast process and thus fits prevalent live broadcast infrastructure. Evaluations on the real system show that the proposed solution reduces the signal processing delay by at most 5.62% of an audio buffer length in mobile phones and ensures real-time signal processing. It also achieves a data rate of 156.25 bps in a specific configuration and greatly outperforms recent works.