The preservation of temporal dependencies among a group of processes that exchange continuous media at runtime is a key issue for emerging mobile distributed systems (MDS), such as monitoring of biosignals and interactive multiuser games. Although several works are oriented to satisfy temporal dependencies, most of them are not suitable for MDSs. In general, an MDS is characterized by the absence of global references (e.g. shared memory and wall clock), host mobility, limited processing and storage capabilities in mobile hosts, and limited bandwidth on wireless communication channels. This paper proposes an asymmetric synchronization protocol to be used at runtime in an MDS without using a common reference. One main aspect of our synchronization protocol is that it translates temporal constraints to causal dependencies of the continuous media data as seen by the mobile hosts. We simulate the protocol by considering a cellular network environment and by using MPEG-4 encoders. The simulation results show that our protocol is effective in reducing the synchronization error. In addition, the protocol is efficient in terms of processing and storage costs at the mobile devices, as well as in the overhead attached per message across the wired and wireless channels.