| With the technological advancements, both client-server-based and fully decentralized collaborations are gaining popularity. Throughout the last decade, many collaborative tools have emerged based on the former technology or in some cases a combination of both technologies, which is often called hybrid collaboration system. The need for fully decentralized or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) collaboration over the Internet is increasing nowadays. Moreover, due to the rapid growth of multimedia technology over the web, more and more P2P Environments are adopting numerous multimedia applications such as audio, video, text, etc. to enhance the quality of collaboration. However, there are many factors that make this task challenging. These factors include not only the limited bandwidth (especially of peers having dialup connections), the presence of firewalls, proxy servers and Network Address Translation (NAT's) in Intranets, but also how to efficiently design such a fully decentralized system that supports different multimedia. A flexible architecture needs to be defined that overcomes these problems and permits a smooth and rich collaborative multimedia environment that would satisfy the needs of end users. This thesis illustrates the architecture, design and implementation of a fully decentralized collaborative multimedia system called PECOLE (PEer-to-peer COLlaborative Environment). PECOLE supports real-time collaboration and provides the following collaborative facilities: (1) Shared browsing (2) Multilingual collaboration (3) Shared telepointer (4) Moderation (5) Multipoint-to-multipoint audio/video conferencing and (6) Chat. |
