Fault-tolerant real-time synchronous collaboration environment using WWW

Drastic advancements in the computer industry have brought about today's complicated and various computer technologies. In particular, two can be noticed with respect to the area of the computing environment. One is the technology which has enabled video-conferencing, which handles multimedia data on the Mbone, and the other is the World Wide Web (WWW), which provides an environment in which to easily locate various kinds of information that the user wants. The growing interest in video-conferencing has drawn researchers' attention to real-time synchronous collaboration environments. This paper presents the development of such a synchronous collaboration environment which can deal with multimedia data between multiple users in real time using WWW systems. The developed environment can be characterized by two features: the multiplication of transfer channels which support real-time multimedia data transfer, and fault tolerance. Multiplication of transfer channels amplifies the ability to transfer multimedia data, and fault tolerance gives reliability to users.