Building Real-World Ad-Hoc Networks to Support Mobile Collaborative Applications: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Mobile collaboration is required in several work scenarios, i.e. education, healthcare, business and disaster relief. The features and capabilities of the communication infrastructure used by mobile collaborative applications will influence the type of coordination and collaboration that can be supported in real work scenarios. Developers of these applications are typically unaware of the constraints the communication infrastructure imposes on the collaborative system. Therefore, this paper presents an experimental study of how ad-hoc networks can effectively support mobile collaborative work. The article analyzes several networking issues and it determines how they influence the collaborative work. The paper also presents the lessons learned and it provides recommendations to deal with the networking issues intrinsic to adhoc networks.