A P2P Architecture for Supporting Group Communication in CSCW Systems

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems has the requirement of providing the communication architecture needed for groups of diverse users to cooperate in synchronous or asynchronous mode to achieve their common goals. CSCW environments have their own network supporting requirements. Due to the group and diverse QoS nature in CSCW communication, we think that deploying P2P architecture in CSCW is suitable and efficient. In this paper, we present a P2P architecture which support group forming, group awareness, data object distribution, session finding, QoS ensured multicasting in CSCW systems. A system named cooperative program understanding system (CPUS) which implements this architecture is also introduced