Connection management in a Lakes environment

Abstract

Lakes is an architecture for collaborative working developed to support a wide range of collaborative applications of the `same time/different place' variety across different platforms and communication media. When applications wish to share data in such an environment, connections must be established and channels created to provide the necessary communication links. As new nodes join or leave the conference, new connections must be made or broken. If an application is using several distinct channels for different types of data, the management and control of these channels can be a complex task. This paper presents an overview of the Lakes architecture and focuses on two particular features which have been designed to reduce the burden of connection and channel management on the application programmer: (1) the ability of one particular Lakes application, the call manager, to provide flexible connection management on behalf of other applications; and (2) the facility to request that channels are automatically created and destroyed as applications are shared into or unshared from calls.