Research Article
Flockfs, a moderated group authoring system for wireless workgroups
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.MOBIQUITOUS2009.6814, author={Surendar Chandra and Nathan Regola}, title={Flockfs, a moderated group authoring system for wireless workgroups}, proceedings={6th Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS}, year={2009}, month={11}, keywords={Authoring systems Availability Collaboration Collaborative software Collaborative work Delay File systems Peer to peer computing Performance analysis Prototypes}, doi={10.4108/ICST.MOBIQUITOUS2009.6814} }
- Surendar Chandra
Nathan Regola
Year: 2009
Flockfs, a moderated group authoring system for wireless workgroups
MOBIQUITOUS
IEEE
DOI: 10.4108/ICST.MOBIQUITOUS2009.6814
Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of a group authoring system for wireless users. Our analysis of the behavior of various groupware systems using wireless user availability traces showed that prior systems would have performed poorly, especially during peak availability durations when many group members were simultaneously available. These results motivate our design choices. flockfs maintains one updateable copy of the shared content on each group member’s node. It also hoards read-only copies of each of these updateable copies in any interested group member’s node. The various copies are reconciled using a moderation operation; each group member manually incorporates updates from all the other group members into their own copy. The various document versions will eventually converge into a single version through successive moderations. The system assists with this process by automatically logging the provenance of all causal reads of contents from other replicas into the author versions. A prototype userspace file system implementation of flockfs exhibits acceptable file system performance and update propagation latency.