Autonomous and Self-sufficient Groups: Ad hoc Collaborative Environments

Abstract

Asynchronous collaborative applications and systems have to deal with complexities associated with interaction nature, idiosyncrasy of groups and technical and administrative issues of real settings. Existing solutions address asynchronous collaboration via simplified and centralized models. In this paper we present LaCOLLA, a fully decentralized middleware for building collaborative applications that provides general purpose collaborative functionality without requiring anyone to provide resources for the whole group. This helps applications to incorporate collaboration support and deal with most complexities derived from groups and its members. The implementation of LaCOLLA follows the peer-to-peer paradigm and pays special attention to the autonomy of its members and to the self-organization of its components. Resources (e.g. storage, task execution) and services (e.g. authorization) are provided by its members, avoiding dependency from third party agents or servers. This work was first validated by simulation. Then we built the middleware and adapted some collaborative applications.