Supporting online/offline collaborative work with WebRTC application migration

Abstract

With the fast development of mobile computing and increasing computing capacities of mobile devices, new collaborative applications and platforms are appearing to support collaboration on the move. Indeed, nowadays, members of a team can be not only geographically distributed but they can also work anytime and anywhere thanks to the use of mobile devices. Often, however, team members would like to work either online or offline on a common project; likewise, they may wish to switch among various devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones and still work in the same application environment, sharing the same data, etc. In this paper we present a platform that enables application and services migration at runtime between different platforms using the WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) framework. We have studied applications migration both through a central server and through a distributed (Peer-to-Peer) model. Various issues that arise in application migration such as profile matching, application context, data synchronisation and consistency are discussed. The efficiency and scalability of the WebRTC framework and mobile devices (peers) under Android in a real computing infrastructure are studied. Some experimental results on the application migration time according to application state data size are reported.