Improving the responsiveness in multiplatform collaborative environments

Abstract

This paper addresses the design issues that may improve the responsiveness of a multi-platform collaborative modeling system, for which robustness and awareness are necessary requirements. The key points of our proposal are, whenever possible, (1) to reduce as much as possible the granularity of the transmission data over network; (2) to simplify as much as possible the functional feedbacks for fast screen update; and (3) to avoid as much as possible the network accesses for synchronization. On the basis of these hypotheses, we explore the features of a hybrid groupware architecture and show the feasibility of our proposal. Several latencies are measured to validate our assumptions.