<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">MiCa</Emphasis>: Lightweight and mobile collaboration across a collaborative editing service in the cloud

Nowadays, we assist to an explosion of mobile applications due to the rapid development of mobile devices, which are becoming the device of choice for people to collaborate with family members, friends and business colleagues and/or customers. Mobile devices (such as smartphones, tablets and laptops) are well-suited for information delivery than sophisticated desktop PCs in many professional areas (e.g. writing reports for disaster management). However, collaboratively editing a shared document in real-time through ad-hoc peer-to-peer mobile networks requires increasing amounts of computation, data storage and network communication. More particularly, preserving the consistency in a decentralized way of the manipulated shared document under constraints of the mobile applications, namely the freshness and the energy consumption, remains still problematic. In this paper, we propose a new cloud service-based approach, called MiCa (Mobile Collaboration in the Cloud), to achieve efficient and scalable real-time editing works by allowing mobile users an online access to abundant computing power and data storage. Our service is a two levels system. The first level provides self-protocol to create clones of mobiles, manage users’ groups and recover failed clones in the cloud. The second level supports safe mechanisms for synchronizing collaborative works in fully decentralized way. On the mobile side, the energy consumption is largely reduced since all procedures for maintaining consistency of shared documents are executed on the clone side. Based on three important criteria (energy consumption, network traffic and responsiveness time), an experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of our service MiCa.