consistency maintenance based on the mark & retrace technique in groupware systems

ACM Group 2005 Conference

Consistency Maintenance Based on the Mark

& Retrace Technique in Groupware Systems

Ning Gu, Jiang-Ming Yang and Qi-Wei ZhangFudan University

Jiang-Ming Yang


April 21, 2023 Fudan University, Cooperative Information and Systems Laboratory 2

OUTLINE

Introduction & Motivation

Address Space Transformation

Mark & Retrace Technique

Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported

Related Works & Conclusions



OUTLINE




Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported




INTRODUCTION What’s Group Editors?

Most commonly used groupware applications. Multiple users’ participationUser can edit and modify shared data objects,

such as word, graphics, and media documents, using a computer network.

Techniques for building group editors have been widely applied and practiced.

A Powerful research vehicles in exploring solution to consistency problems.



MOTIVATION & CHALLENGE In the past decade, OT method has been

gradually improved.

Control AlgorithmsOT Functions

An OT algorithm which can maintains the CCI model and solved TP2 puzzle and false-tie (ERV) puzzle will be very intricate.



OUTLINE




Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported




ADDRESS SPACE TRANSFORMATION

Example 1:

Initial document is “abd”.

O4 and O5 are two concurrent operations.

In OT Technique, due to the existence of concurrent operation O4, O5 shall be transformed to Insert [“c”, 2] before execution on site U1.



ADDRESS SPACE TRANSFORMATION



OUTLINE




Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported




THE STRUCTURE OF MARK & RETRACE A document is a liner

structure composed of characters.

Each character may have several operations targeting itself while each operation targets only one character.

Add the effective / ineffective mark information to every node in the liner structure.

The address space can be expressed as the effective character nodes from left to right.



THE RETRACING PROCEDURE The goal of the Retracing procedure is to retrace

the address space to the state at a given timestamp SV.

Consider the following four situations. if SVOins ≥ SV , then this node is marked ineffective;

if SVOins ≤ SV and there is no Delete targeting this character node, then this node is marked effective;

if SVOins ≤ SV and SVOdel ≥ SV , then this node is marked effective;

if SVOins ≤ SV but SVOdel ≤ SV , then this node is marked ineffective.



THE CONTROL ALGORITHM Control-Algorithm (DocS, O), execute O on

DocS.

Retracing(DocS, SVO)

Execute the operation O, and attach the operation with its timestamp to the character node.

SVS[R] ⇐ SVS[R] + 1

Retracing(DocS, SVS)



EXAMPLE 1: Effective node & ineffective

node

User U1 intends to execute operation Insert[“c”, 3] with timestamp <1,1,2>.

User’s view is “ad”.



EXAMPLE 1: First, retrace the

document to the state at the time of timestamp <1,1,2>.

Conceal the effect of operation Delete[“b”, 2].

Character node “b” become “Effective”.

User’s view is “abd”.



EXAMPLE 1: The document’s state at the time of timestamp

<1,1,2> is the state at the time of operation’s ( Insert [“c”, 3] ) generation.

Operation Insert [“c”, 3] can be executed directly in this new address space.



EXAMPLE 1: The State Vector of the local site has been adjusted to

<2,1,2> after the execution is finished.

And then it retraces to the view “acd” of new State Vector by restoring the effect of operation Delete[“b”, 2] and adding the execution effect of the new operation Insert[“c”, 3].



OPERATION EXECUTION The Delete operation’s execution is simple. The process is to find the

corresponding character node, attach the operation on the character node and then perform the Retracing procedure to give this node a correct effective/ineffective mark.

The Insert is to search for an Inserting position in the address space, which is corresponding to a range in document between two effective character nodes. There may exist some other ineffective character nodes in this range.

A Range-Scan process to determine the right-and-left relation between the new Insert and these ineffective character nodes and then find an accurate position.



OPERATION EXECUTION To realize the comparability between two Insert

operations, define a TOrder function:

Given two character nodes CNa and CNb. The attached operations are generated at site a and site b, and are timestamped by SVa and SVb.

TOrder(CNa) < TOrder(CNb), iff

sum(SVa) < sum(SVb)

a < b, when sum(SVa) = sum(SVb)

Where sum(SV) =



OPERATION EXECUTION INSERT RULES:

1) The new character node should be inserted in the range.

2) If there is a existed character node CN, the insert operation of CN is causally before CNnew, CNnew should be inserted on the left of CN.

3) If there is a existed character node CN1, TOrder(CNnew)<TOrder(CN1) and CN1 do not meets the rule 4, CNnew should be insert on the left of CN1.

4) Otherwise, if there is two existed character node CN1 and CN2, CN2 is on the right of CN1, CNnew should be inserted on the right of CN2 when :

TOrder(CNnew)<TOrder(CN1)

TOrder(CNnew)>TOrder(CN2)

CN2 is causally before CN1



OPERATION EXECUTION INSERT EXECUTION:

Scan the range from left to right. If there is a existed character node meets the rule 2,

return this position immediately. If there is a existed character node meets the rule 3,

record this position into a variable P. If the record meets the rule 4, clean the record.



CAUSALITY PRESERVATION To achieve causality preservation, we only

need to ensure that every remote operation is causally-ready before its execution, which we call execution condition.

It should be noted that even if causality is preserved, the execution order of the operations would still be different because of their different orders of arrival at different sites.



CONVERGENCE

The Proof：

2 operations

Same Scan-Ranges Different Scan-Ranges

n operations



INTENTION PRESERVATION Since a Insert operation can find the correct scan-

range and a Delete operation can find its corresponding character node at any sites and they do not interfere with other operations, those satisfy operations’ definition.

However, there are still some arguments about the proof of achieving intention preservation, we plan to present more about intention’s formal definition and the complete proof in the next future.



OUTLINE




Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported




OPERATION EXECUTION EFFICIENCY Reorganize the character nodes to a Red-Black Tree and

ensure the result of pre-order traversal of the Black-Red tree is the original linear order.

Every node of the tree saves two additional data —the two numbers of the effective character nodes of left sub-tree and right sub-tree.

The amortized costs of Insert and Delete are both O(logn).



EFFICIENCY OPTIMIZATION OF RETRACING Use the “Garbage Collection” method to handle a

operation list containing the operations which haven’t been executed at some sites.

Suppose the length of operation list is h which means we need to check and change at most h character nodes’ effective/ineffective mark during Retracting process.

In the second Retracing process, we restore the changed nodes instead of the Retracing process. After then, we only need to deal with the targeting character node of the new operation.



OUTLINE




Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported




UNDO SUPPORTED Given an Undo operation O2, Undo[O1], in which O1’s

target position is P1 and timestamped by SVO1. The execution process can be performed as follow.

Retrace the address space to the state at the time SVO1; count to the P1th effective character node and attach O2

on it. Then the second Retracing process takes this new Undo

into consideration and gives this node the correct effective / ineffective mark.

Append a Delete counter to every character node to realize the Multi-version / Single-display strategy.



OUTLINE




Efficiency Analysis

Undo Supported




RELATED WORKS The initial concept of Mark & Retrace was proposed early in

Document Mark Technique but was not able to solve the dOPT puzzle.

dOPT, adOPTed and GOTO cannot fully satisfy TP2.

NICE and SOCT3/4 is not able to resolve the false-tie (ERV) puzzle.

GOT fail in the case of complicated false-tie (ERV) scenarios.

Imine et al. tried to support TP2 by expanding IT function but fails in solving dOPT puzzle.

A solution of false-tie (ERV) has been realized in Co-Word system, it is still not published.

Li et al. also reported a solution and gave the proof.



CONCLUSIONS In this paper we propose a strategy which can

maintain CCI model and is different from OT. It does not ensure the operation’s execution correctness by modifying the operation’s address but by transforming the address space of the document.

Since the Mark & Retrace processes do not affect the relative position (left or right) between characters, it is easier to maintain operations’ order. It can not only achieve all the consistency criteria, but can support any Undo as well.



Thanks!

consistency maintenance based on the mark & retrace technique in groupware systems

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