Multicast Trees for Collaborative Applications

Current implementations of real-time collaborative applications rely on a dedicated infrastructure to carry out all synchronizing and communication functions, and require all end nodes to communicate directly with and through the central server. In this paper, we investigate an architecture, in which the most resource intensive functionality of continuous communication among collaborators to disseminate changes is decentralized, utilizing the end users as relays. We observe that communication characteristics of real-time collaboration makes use of existing multicast mechanisms unsuitable. As collaborative editing sessions are typically long, we are able to gather and then use additional parameters of nodes (their instabilities and frequency of sending updates) and communication links (latencies and average costs). We identify several criteria to determine the quality of a multicast tree: cost, latency and instability. We analyze the complexity of these problems and propose algorithms to optimize the communication topology. We also consider the multiobjective problem in which we search for a tree that results in a good trade-off between these measures. Validation of algorithms on numerous graphs shows that it is important to consider the multiobjective problem, as optimal solutions for one performance measure can be far from optimal values of the others.