Scalable and Resilient Application Sharing System for Internet Collaboration

Abstract

Increased desktop processing power and network bandwidth have made feasible distributed multimedia collaborative systems. Such systems are characterized by video, audio and data exchanges. While there has been much research and development of protocols and services for video and audio transmission, less work has been focused on data sharing particularly when the data is being generated by an application in real time and in turns controlled by one or more of the participants in the collaborative session. While sharing the view of an application can be thought of as a kind of video stream, the unique characteristics of these dynamic images require new algorithms and transmission protocols to achieve legibility and size dynamic. This paper describes a protocol and its implementation for sharing desktop applications in a distributed collaborative session. Key objectives of this protocol are scalability and resilience to dropped packages and to participants joining and leaving a session. We describe design decisions and give results demonstrating the effect two different compression algorithms and protocol parameters. Finally, Odust a tool sharing system built on the implementation of shared application views is described.