CollabKit - A Multi-User Multicast Collaboration System based on VNC

摘要

Computer-supported real-time collaboration systems offer functionality to let two or more users work together at the same time, allowing them to jointly create, modify and exchange electronic documents, use applications, and share information location-independently and in real-time. Commonly, such collaboration systems are realised using remote desktop technology or are implemented as web applications. However, none of the examined existing solutions support concurrent multi-user interaction in an application-independent manner. Furthermore, when used in low-throughput shared-medium computer networks such as WLANs or cellular networks, most of the investigated systems do not scale well with an increasing number of users, making them unsuitable for multi-user collaboration of a high number of participants. Therefore in this paper we present a collaboration system that supports concurrent multi-user interaction with standard desktop applications and is able to serve a high number of users in low-throughput environments. Our multi-user multicast collaboration system named CollabKit, realised by integrating and extending existing technologies, was compared against a conventional unicast remote desktop system and found to significantly outperform it when several clients needed to be served. CollabKit supports application-independent concurrent operation by multiple users, per-user graphical annotations and window sharing and scales well with an increasing number of users.