Distributed Floor Control Protocols for Supporting Priorities in Collaborative Applications

Abstract

Collaborative applications are becoming popular with availability of broadband wide area networks. There are several collaborative applications such as computer controlled priority right auctioning, multiplayer online video games, collaborative editing and collaborative simulations. Important issues in distributed floor controls are to provide exclusive access communication channel for single user at a time and to maintain causal ordering of messages. This paper presents an implementation of CSMA MAC protocol to solve floor control problem. In many situations it is necessary to have priorities in the group collaboration to give higher access to users who deserve, but the distributed floor control protocols implemented till now do not provide priority based group collaboration. In this paper, I propose to implement priority based distributed floor control protocols using Aloha, DQDB and CSMA MAC protocols on overlay networks. Finally, I compare the efficiencies of these MAC protocols with and without priority using network simulator-2.