In recent years, we have witnessed a growing interest in the synchronous collaboration based class of applications. Several techniques for collaborative virtual environments (CVE), haptic, audio and visual environments (C-HAVE) have been designed. However, several challenging issues remain to be resolved before CVE and C-HAVE become a common place. In this paper, we focus on applications that are based on closely coupled and highly synchronized haptic tasks that require a high-level of coordination among the participants. Four main protocols have been designed to resolve the synchronization issues in such environments: the synchronous collaboration transport protocol, the selective reliable transmission protocol, the reliable multicast transport protocol and the scalable reliable multicast. While these four protocols have shown good performance for CVE and C-HAVE class of applications, none of these protocols has been able to meet all of the basic CVE requirements, i.e., scalability, reliability, synchronization, and minimum delay. In this paper, we present a hybrid protocol that is able to satisfy all of the CVE and C-HAVE requirements and discuss its implementation and results in two tele-surgery applications.
Childhood obesity is nowadays considered as one of the major health problems that many societies suffer from. The obesity epidemic leads to several life threatening conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and mental health problems like depression, anxiety and loneliness just to mention a few. Several approaches, including physical exercises, strict dietary, and exergames among others, have been adopted to address the obesity epidemic. Exergames are considered the innovative approach for fighting several health problem such as the obesity, where a combination of exercise and 3D gaming are proposed to incite kids to exercise as a team. Collaborative exergaming became even more popular given that it addresses the social side of the obesity epidemic, and it motivates kids to socialize with other kids. Traditional exergames are based on the client server approach where the server is responsible for streaming the 3D environment. However, this can lead to latency and server bottleneck if many clients participate in the exergame, which leads to the kids stopping exercising. Having an exergame application that does not suffer from networking problem such as delay, is very important given that it increases the exercise hours. In this work, we propose a new trend of mobile collaborative exergming applications that is based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, as well as two supplying partner selection protocols that aim at selecting the suitable source responsible for streaming the relevant 3D data. Our system, that we refer to as MOSAIC, is intended for mobile collaborative exergames that incite kids to move inside a large area, using thin mobile devices such as head mounted devices (HMD), have physical exercises, and collaborate with other kids which in consequence address several health problems such as the obesity epidemic on the physical and social plans. Our proposed mobile collaborative exergame aims at inciting the kids to exercise as a team for a longer time by improving the quality of the streaming and reducing the delay. This is accomplished by our proposed supplying partner selection protocols that provide a quick discovery of multiple supplying partners, by minimizing the time required the to acquire data. The performance evaluation we have obtained to evaluate our suite of protocols using a realistic set of exergame scenarios for obese kids is then presented and discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.