On demand consistency control for collaborative graphics editing systems in heterogeneous environments

The wide availability of wireless devices has become one of the main challenges for designers of collaborative applications like collaborative graphics editing. Mobile devices are not as "standardized" as stationary computers but are much more diverse with respect to computing resources, connection bandwidth and display capabilities. In this paper, we present a semi-replicated architecture which supports multiple degrees of consistency maintenance for collaborative graphics editing systems in heterogeneous environments. To maintain consistency of the replicas on mobile embedded devices, either data consistency or semantic consistency is maintained based on the prediction of the regions of interest. The proposed on demand consistency maintenance scheme for mobile sites makes collaboration more efficiently. The scheme is realized in our prototype system of collaborative graphics editing system that can work well in heterogeneous environments.