The Design of Network Services for Advanced Collaborative Environments

Advanced collaborative environments are one of the most important tools for interacting with colleagues distributed around the world. However, heterogeneous characteristics such as network transfer rates, computational abilities, and hierarchical systems make the seamless integration of distributed resources a challenge. This paper proposes the design of two network services, Collaborative Environment Network Service Architecture (CENSA) and Infrastructure (CENSI), that embed network services into various systems intelligently and elastically and support seamless advanced collaborative environments. We present a multilayered model for their current utilization and future development. We describe various network services and discuss some open issues.