Improving Awareness in Mobile CSCW

Abstract

The diffusion of mobile devices in the working landscape is promoting collaboration across time and space. Following through this development, we investigate opportunities for improving awareness in mobile environments with a view to enable collaboration under power constraints and transitory network disconnections. We elaborate in particular on synchronous CSCW and expose with it significant details of group awareness, while we contribute a protocol for awareness support over large areas that strikes a balance between energy consumption and notification time. To avoid user disruption, this protocol notifies awareness information in a multicast fashion, while the bandwidth is allocated dynamically among notifications and data requests, thus minimizing the time needed by each one of them and ensuring the isochronous delivery of information to all clients. The efficiency and scalability of our protocol are evaluated with simulation experiments, whereby we compare various notification schemes and finally choose one that changes dynamically over time