Research On Heterogeneous Network-Oriented Dynamical Architecture For CSCES

Along with the blossom of collaboration work in the world, the organization of the collaboration team shows the new characteristics. The division of the work becomes detailed. And the aims of the work become more flexible. With these requirements the organization of the collaboration team becomes more flexible too. In a collaboration process, a specific collaborator's aim may vary. The leader of the collaboration team tends to divide both the project and the team into smaller unit for better control. A group of collaborators would take responsibility of completing a smaller but more specific mandate. Because of the detailed division of collaboration group, the possibility of conflicting operation between the members that belong to one group would be greater than with other members. And the members of a group would also change in the collaboration process.Based on the new characteristics above, this paper proposes a new adaptive architecture for Computer Supported Collaborative Editing System on the basis of the original CSCW hybrid architecture. With introduction of dynamic feature, the new architecture can automatically adjust its architecture according to the coupled degree between two users' operations in the runtime. The adjustment of the architecture could effectively reduce the lag time between the conflicting operations submitted and the discovery of these operations. It would help reduce the loss of the performance of the system and the efficiency of the whole collaboration team. With a surveillance module help, the system could recognize when the coupled degree of two users or a particular site's performance changes largely. And the pre-defined adjustment strategy could ensure the collaboration efficiency of the system.We also discuss the network environment in the paper. As PDA, cell phones and other handheld devices and the radio network service grow mor popular. People hope that they could use the handheld device to participate in the collaboration process from any places at any time. This demand requires the CSCW system could work properly in a heterogeneous network environment. The sites may communicate with each other from high-speed LAN, VPN, radio service network and etc. However, when the new architecture model determines the architecture of the system, the network properties are not treat as the primary starting point. Since the bandwidth among the sites may vary largely, some client site would transmit information slowly with the specific server which would hurt the system's efficiency heavily. For solving the problems that mentioned above, the pattern system includes a routing module in its network layout. Every site that participates in the collaboration process would perform as a router for others, which is transparent to above layer. All the messages transmit among sites would use the routing algorithm for the best transmitting path. QoS is also introduced into the pattern system for enhancing the reliability and the efficiency of the system.