Lightweight scalable tool sharing for the Internet

Increased desktop processing power and network bandwidth have made feasible distributed multimedia collaborative systems. Such systems are characterized by video, audio and data exchanges. While there has been much research and development of protocols and services for video and audio transmission, less work has been focused on data sharing particularly when the data is being generated by an application in real time and in turns controlled by one or more of the participants in the collaborative session. This paper describes a protocol and its implementation for sharing desktop applications in a distributed collaborative session. Key objectives of this protocol are scalability and resilience to dropped packages and to participants joining and leaving a session. We describe design decisions and give results demonstrating the effect of two different compression algorithms and protocol parameters. Finally, Odust a tool sharing system built on the implementation of shared application views is described.