Efficient network management for collaborative services and application development

Collaborative services and applications are becoming increasingly important and complex, and have requirements for real-time multimedia support, high bandwidth availability and low delays. The collaborative application view of QoS encompasses the transport network and the end systems, as well as computational requirements. Therefore, how to coordinate and integrate collaboration management and network resource sharing efficiently and effectively is becoming more complex: a higher-level functionality is required in parallel with a satisfying performance. The functionality should satisfy the requirements of different levels of collaboration and respect a hierarchy of priorities among users and tasks. The performance, depending on the application or the network, should be sufficient for real-time information exchange, which is quite often a "heavy data exchange". We have developed a management framework to satisfy the complex functionality requirements that arise in the development of collaborative applications and services. The emphasis in designing such a framework is given on several levels of design that affect the performance of collaboration environments, the connection management, the replication management, the data management and the effective and interoperable usage of resources. Based on the proposed framework, we present a Java-based application for mission planning.