AGORA: an integrated approach for collaboration in MANETs

Nowadays, a growing interest exists for collaborative working environments. Proliferation of hand-held devices with networking capabilities, together with the free-of-charge characteristic have turned MANETs in a good alternative for group spontaneous collaboration. In order to reduce application development difficulty and adjust to MANET specific requirements, middleware approaches seem a good alternative for developing new collaboration applications. However, it is not easy to find a system which allows rapid application deployment. Building applications from scratch makes developing applications for ad hoc scenarios a difficult task. To cope with these requirements, we introduce AGORA, an integrated approach for collaborative applications in the MANET environment. AGORA provides an architecture with three well defined elements: a plug-in framework which simplifies the development of MANET collaborative applications; a collaboration middleware which offers communication and group services to application plug-ins, and finally, a routing layer in charge of providing efficient group communication.