Extending real time mobile collaboration algorithm to handle membership events in an ad-hoc mobile network

Real time mobile collaboration systems allow two or more geographically separated users to work on a shared document at the same time. There has been a large amount of work on consistency management for real-time collaboration in replicated architectures, however, the algorithms depend on fixed membership, and are not suited to ad-hoc mobile networks. This paper builds on the previous work of the authors by enhancing the algorithm to handle membership events. The proposed algorithm is built on point to point membership management, and uses a state map to handle multiple sites joining the session at the same time. It is able to manage all membership events while maintaining document consistency. The algorithm has been implemented and evaluated across a number of mobile collaboration scenarios. The results show that the algorithm is able to handle membership events correctly with a relatively low impact on resource consumption