XGSP-Floor: Floor Control for Synchronous and Ubiquitous Collaboration

With the advances in a variety of software/hardware technologies and wireless networking, there is coming a need for ubiquitous collaboration which allows people to access information systems independent of their access device and their physical capabilities and to communicate with other people in anytime and anywhere. Also, with the maturity of evolving computing paradigms and collaborative applications, a workspace for working together is being expanded from locally collocated physical place to geographically dispersed virtual place. Current virtual conferencing systems are not suitable for building integrated collaboration systems to work together in the same collaboration session. They also lack support for ubiquitous collaboration. As the number of collaborators with a large number of disparate access devices increases, mechanisms for dealing with consistency in an application shared among collaborators will have to be considered in an unambiguous manner. In this paper we address issues related in building a framework for synchronous and ubiquitous collaboration as well as heterogeneous community collaboration. First, to make ubiquitous collaboration more promising, we briefly present a framework built on heterogeneous (wire, wireless) computing environment and a set of session protocols defined in XML to provide a generic solution for controlling sessions and participants’ presences in collaboration, developed by Global-MMCS (Global Multimedia Collaboration System) project in Community Grids Lab (CGL) at Indiana University. Second, to provide a solution for maintaining shared state consistency at application level, we present a floor control mechanism which coordinates activities occurred in synchronously cooperating applications being shared among collaborators. The mechanism with strict conflict avoidance and non-optimistic locking strategy allows all participants to have the same views and data at all times.