Shelfaware: Accelerating Collaborative Awareness with Shelf CRDT

<p>Collaboration has become a key feature of modern software, allowing teams to work together effectively in real-time while in different locations. In order for a user to communicate their intention to several distributed peers, computing devices must exchange high-frequency updates with transient metadata like mouse position, text range highlights, and temporary comments. Current peer-to-peer awareness solutions have high time and space complexity due to the ever-expanding logs that each client must maintain in order to ensure robust collaboration in eventually consistent environments. This paper proposes an awareness Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library that provides the tooling to support an eventually consistent, decentralized, and robust multi-user collaborative environment. Our library is tuned for rapid iterative updates that communicate fine-grained user actions across a network of collaborators. Our approach holds memory constant for subsequent writes to an existing key on a shared resource and completely prunes stale data from shared documents. These features allow us to keep the CRDT's memory footprint small, making it a feasible solution for memory constrained applications. Results show that our CRDT implementation is comparable to or exceeds the performance of similar data structures in high-frequency read/write scenarios.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

MS in Computer Science

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Year dc:date.available

2023

Author dc:creator

• Waidhofer, John C

Contributors dc:contributor

• Maria Pantoja
• Computer Science
• College of Engineering

• Distributed Computing
• Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type
• Collaboration
• Computational Engineering
• Data Storage Systems
• Digital Communications and Networking

Identifier

10.15368/theses.2023.2

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.calpoly.edu:theses-4217