Coordination Model for Real-Time Collaborative Editors

Real-time Collaborative Editors (RCE) are a class of distributed systems based on the interaction of several users trying to edit simultaneously shared documents, such as articles, wiki pages and programming source code. Operational Transformation (OT) is considered as the efficient and safe method for consistency maintenance in the literature of collaborative editors. Indeed, it is aimed at ensuring copies convergence even though the users's updates are executed in any order on different copies. Unfortunately, existing OT algorithms often fail to achieve this objective. Moreover, these algorithms have limited scalability with the number of users as they use vector timestamps to enforce causality dependency. In this paper, we present a novel coordination model for managing collaborative editing work in a scalable and decentralized fashion. It may be deployed easily on P2P networks as it supports dynamic groups where users can leave and join at any time.