Efficient Network Management for Collaborative Services and Application Development

∗ This research is conducted while the author was with CAIP Research Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Abstract Collaborative services and applications are becoming increasingly important and complex and have requirements for real-time multimedia support, high bandwidth availability, and low delays. The collaborative application view of QoS encompasses transport network, end systems as well as computational requirements. Therefore, how to coordinate and integrate collaboration management and network resource sharing efficiently and effectively is becoming more complex: a higher level functionality is required in parallel with a satisfying performance. The functionality should satisfy requirements of different levels of collaboration, and respect a hierarchy of priorities among users and tasks. The performance, depending on the application or the network, should be sufficient for real time information exchange, which is quite often a “heavy data exchange”. We have developed a management framework to satisfy complex functionality requirements that arise in collaborative applications and services development. The emphasis in designing such a framework, is given on several levels of design that affect the performance of collaboration environments, the connection management, the replication management, the data management, and the effective and interoperable usage of resources. Based on the proposed framework we present a Java-based application for mission planning.