ROCC: A Communication Overlay Abstraction for Wireless Users

As wireless devices become more popular, the potential for new collaborative applications has emerged. For example, a group of coworkers can opportunistically come together and share project documents and other data. Such applications are characterized by the fact that information needs to be distributed among all members of a group. Supporting such coordination currently requires using low-level multicast protocols that are complex and resource intensive to initialize and maintain without the support of an infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce the ring overlay for collaborative coordination (ROCC), which offers a fair, reliable coordination service for wireless environments. ROCC specifically addresses wireless application situations requiring group coordination. ROCC is influenced by traditional token ring and overlay communication protocols but leverages unique properties of the broadcast nature of the wireless environment to improve performance. The result is a minimal, fair, dynamic group coordination service. This paper introduces the ROCC abstraction and demonstrates its potential through analysis.