A priority-based message synchronization support using the focus and nimbus model for real-time groupwares over wired and wireless networks

Abstract

With the proliferation of wireless network support and the advances of mobile devices, there is a growing need of making it available for a wireless network as well. Low bandwidth of a wireless network is one of the major issues that should be considered for extending a synchronous collaboration system developed for a wired network to support a wireless network. We propose a priority-based view synchronization scheme, exploiting the relaxed synchronization. The proposed scheme leverages the fact that mobile users need not have the exactly same view as the users in a wired network since they usually have a limited screen size and thus focus only on part of a whole document. We evaluate the performance of a simple group editor with the proposed scheme using ns-2. The performance results show that the proposed scheme keeps the message transmission delay low so that mobile users can have synchronous collaboration with wired users without any significant delay.