Collaboration over Wired and Wireless Networks

Abstract--Digital networking has become pervasive, bringing advantages of distributed computing and collaboration that are time and space independent. But, users typically employ devices with widely disparate capabilities. Design of networked systems that can accommodate such disparities, while achieving maximum utility, is therefore a key research issue. Real-time application sharing in heterogeneous environments requires solving many software-architectural and networking quality-of-service problems. The research efforts towards this goal are very few and very recent. This report presents our framework for developing software applications that deal with heterogeneity and our experiences with its implementation and deployment in an academic environment. We present a software architecture and evaluate human performance for collaboration in heterogeneous virtual worlds. Index Terms--Collaboration systems and technologies, groupware, wireless and mobile computing. I