GPRIDE - A GENERALIZED PRIORITY-BASED DISTRIBUTED FLOOR CONTROL PROTOCOL FOR COLLABORATIVE APPLICATIONS

摘要

Nowadays Internet users participate in different types of collaborative applications from different parts of the world. In these types of applications, users need to coordinate access to shared resources. This coordination is termed as floor control and researchers have proposed different types of floor control protocols in the literature. Certain types of collaborative applications require that a user with higher priority will be given preference over a user with lower priority at the time of floor assignment by the underlying protocol. This implies that the protocol needs to consider the priority of the user while assigning the floor. If two users are contending for the floor and their priorities are same, then the user who has requested the floor first will get the floor before the other user. These applications also require that this coordination should be performed without the help of any centralized controller. In this paper, we propose GPRIDE - a Generalized Priority-based Distributed floor control protocol for collaborative applications. We have implemented our proposed protocol using BSD Sockets API and tested the performance of the protocol on the PlanetLab network for different conditions. PlanetLab is an overlay testbed that connects several academic and research institutions all over the world in a virtual network.