Collaborative Editing over Opportunistic Networks: State of the Art and Challenges

Abstract

Abstract-Emerging Opportunistic Networks (ON) are under intensive research and development by many academics. However, research efforts on ON only addressed routing protocols as well as data dissemination. Too little attention was given to the applications that can be deployed over ON. These are assumed to use immutable data (e.g., photos/video files). Nevertheless, Collaborative Editors (CE) which are based on mutable messages are widely used in many fields. Indeed, they allow many users to concurrently edit the same shared document (e.g., Google Docs). Consequently, it becomes necessary to adapt CE to ON which represents a challenging task. As a matter of fact, CE synchronization algorithms should ensure the convergence of the shared content being modified concurrently by users. In this work, we give an overview on ON and CE in an attempt to combine both states of the art. We highlight the challenges that could be faced when trying to deploy CE over ON.