Comparison of floor control protocols for collaborative multimedia environments
Hans‐Peter Dommel, Jose Joaquin Garcia-Luna-Aceves · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
Improvements in networking allow for increasingly complex collaboration environments with regard to sessions scale, range of shared tasks, and distance between remote parties. Floor control protocols add an access discipline to such environments that allows to mitigate race conditions on shared resources and throttle media transmission. Primary causes for resource competition among users may be the lack of mutual awareness sand formal session orchestration, or network and shot limitations. Various, often proprietary and unscalable solutions for floor control have been implemented for telemedicine, video conferencing, or distributed interactive simulation. To this date, an analytic comparison of the efficacy of these solutions is lacking. With efficacy, we mean the proportion of time that a protocol takes to allocate a resource, accounting for social and technical overhead for muser behavior, protocol cost, and network conditions. We present a novel taxonomy an comparative performance analysis of known classes of floor control protocols, including socially driven protocols, collision sensing on shared resource, floor taken passing in fully-connected and ring topologies, and, innovatively, across shared control trees. Accordingly, aggregated and selective transmission of control information over a multicast control tree offers the best scalability and efficacy. A novel hierarchical floor control protocol correlating in its operation with tree-based reliable multicast is outlined.