Conferencing and Collaborative Computing

Despite their long research history, few synchronous conferencing tools have found widespread deployment and use. In the area of application sharing, the diversity of platforms and issues of security and state maintenance are predominant. The paper discusses some of the areas where further research and engineering work is necessary, particularly for the audio and video components of multimedia conferences. Hardware support needs to be designed to avoid unnecessary high-rate data transfer through system bus or memory. Operating systems need to be aware of the scheduling requirements of continuous-media applications, which differ from both those of classical computing applications and industrial real-time systems. Networks need to be designed to provide end-to-end quality of service assurance and scalable multicast. Since the diversity of conferencing applications far exceeds that of small-group sessions, mechanisms to reuse conferencing applications in a variety of settings have to be developed.