STATISTICAL METHOD FOR DYNAMICALLY CONTROLLING THE PLAYBACK DELAY OF NETWORK MULTIMEDIA STREAMS

A method is disclosed for maintaining and updating statistical trends of network delay to provide a predictive approach to synchronization. Necessary information, such as timing and stream ID information, is gathered from streams of data and future network delay values are predicted by constructing a measured packet-delay distribution curve. In a preferred embodiment, the inventive system maintains a delay histogram with a discrete set of quantization bins, each storing the relative frequency with which a particular delay value is expected to occur among the arriving packets. The histogram is then used to approximate the distribution in the form of a curve.