ACE: Architecture for collaborative environments

With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, people are demanding high-performance high-quality online multimedia systems where a large number of users can collaborate with each other. Incorporating these features usually results in the following issues: high bandwidth usage, lower interactivity, higher latency; and often, only low quality compressed multimedia content can be used. In this paper we present the ACE architecture which is implemented in a virtual collaborative environment and tries to overcome the mentioned drawbacks.