A sequence transformation algorithm for supporting cooperative work on mobile devices

  • Authors:

  • Bin Shao;Du Li;Ning Gu

  • Affiliations:

  • Fudan University, Shanghai, China;Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Operational transformation (OT) is a promising technique for supporting collaboration using mobile devices because it allows users to work on local data replicas even in a disconnected mode. However, as work goes mobile, a large number of operations may accumulate, defying the capacity of current OT algorithms that are mostly designed for real-time group editing. Since their assumption is that operations are propagated frequently, they generally only address how to integrate one remote operation at a time. As a consequence, most algorithms take O(|H|2) to integrate one operation and thus O(|H|3) to integrate a long sequence, where H is the operation history. This paper proposes a novel algorithm that provides optimized transformation of long sequences, improving the time complexity to O(|H|). Our experiments will show that it takes 59 minutes in a recent algorithm versus 1.5 seconds in this work to integrate two long sequences on a mobile device. The performance improvement is critical towards achieving desired responsiveness and group productivity in a class of mobile collaborative applications.