Moversight: A group communication protocol for mobile collaborative applications

Increasing mobility and collaboration are key aspects of ubiquitous communication. Mobile collaborative applications require novel schemes for group communication that actively support closed collaborations in wireless scenarios. Existing group communication protocols do not sufficiently support, for instance, temporary losses of connections with the group. In this paper, we present Moversight, a new P2P group communication protocol, which was specifically designed for closed groups in mobile environments with varying churn rates. It supports up to 100 mobile, nomadic or stationary participants. Moversight applies a new group communication paradigm, called mobile optimistic virtual synchrony, to handle churn-related peer failures. We describe the main protocol features of Moversight and present simulation results to demonstrate its applicability.