Web-Based and Quality-Oriented Remote Collaboration Platform Tolerant to Severe Network Constraints

Abstract

Existing remote collaboration systems are not suitable for a collaboration style where distributed users touch work tools at the same time, especially in demanding use cases or in severe network situations. To cover a wider range of use cases, we propose a novel concept of a remote collaboration platform that enables the users to share currently-used work tools with a high quality A/V transmission module, while maintaining the advantages of web-based systems. It also provides functions to deal with long transmission delay using relay servers, packet transmission instability using visual feedback of audio delivery and limited bandwidth using dynamic allocation of video bitrate. We implemented the platform and conducted evaluation tests. The results show the feasibility of the proposed concept and its tolerance to network constraints, which indicates that the proposed platform can construct unprecedented collaboration systems.