Web-Based and Quality-Oriented Remote Collaboration Platform Tolerant to Severe Network Constraints

Yasuhiro MOCHIDA  Daisuke SHIRAI  Tatsuya FUJII  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E101-D   No.4   pp.944-955
Publication Date: 2018/04/01
Publicized: 2018/01/19
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2016IIP0024
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Intelligent Information and Communication Technology and its Applications to Creative Activity Support)
Category: Technologies for Knowledge Support Platform
Keyword: 
Remote collaboration,  Web-based system,  Network constraint,  

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Summary: 
Existing remote collaboration systems are not suitable for a collaboration style where distributed users touch work tools at the same time, especially in demanding use cases or in severe network situations. To cover a wider range of use cases, we propose a novel concept of a remote collaboration platform that enables the users to share currently-used work tools with a high quality A/V transmission module, while maintaining the advantages of web-based systems. It also provides functions to deal with long transmission delay using relay servers, packet transmission instability using visual feedback of audio delivery and limited bandwidth using dynamic allocation of video bitrate. We implemented the platform and conducted evaluation tests. The results show the feasibility of the proposed concept and its tolerance to network constraints, which indicates that the proposed platform can construct unprecedented collaboration systems.