Consistency Maintenance of Collaborative Shared Documents in Unstable Network Environment

Abstract

Aim to the instability of the mobile internet, the paper proposes an algorithm to achieve the consistency maintenance of the shared documents during the collaborative editing process in the broken network environment. Unlike with the previous studies, we divide network statuses into three types: break-before, break-after and connect-after, in order to record the document and net states, the paper puts forward two new definitions about cursor and network statuses. In the break-before phase, the algorithm updates all the collaborative sites’ cursors regularly to record the latest consistency point. In the break-after phase, the algorithm packs the operations according to cursor and network attributes. While in the connect-after process, the algorithm adapts the address space transformation strategy to resend and execute lost operations as well as constructing necessary performing condition for ABST or other algorithms that support asynchronous cooperation. In this paper, a case analysis is given to describe the execution process of strategy, and correctness proof is also given to validate the whole strategy.