Evaluating data convergence of collaborative editors in opportunistic networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networks (ON) represent an upcoming platform where many mobile devices can communicate without the need of any global or sophisticated network infrastructure. An important advancement in today's technology is the ability to build in ad-hoc and opportunistic way the collaborating group size to disseminate and share data. Using simple communication patterns, these networks are currently a hot topic research area on how adapting and running collaborative applications. In this paper, we are interested in Collaborative Editors (CE) which allow many dispersed users to simultaneously manipulate the same shared data, such as textual or multimedia documents. More precisely, we present a series of experiments to deploy over ON an adapted optimistic replication algorithm based on operational transformation approach and used for supporting collaborative editing works. Due to data replication and the unpredictable arrival order of user updates, the preservation of data convergence is crucially required in CE. Accordingly, we evaluate the effectiveness of the most significant ON routing protocols, PRoPHET and Epidemic, to achieve convergence by observing the behavior of our testbed algorithm through simulations. Our preliminary results indicate that combining CE and ON is not without price. Indeed, the data convergence may be delayed according to the flow of exchanged updates and the size of the group of mobile users.