On effective utilization of wireless networks in collaborative applications

Collaborative applications allow a group of users to work together by sharing information and processes. Traditionally, these applications run in a lab environment with the support of traditional communication networks. Employing wireless technologies in supporting such applications will increase its effectiveness and usability. Wireless networks are rapidly emerging to be the network architecture of choice for many application domains due to their adaptability and scalability. However, skepticism about the level of Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed by wireless networks has prevented them from replacing traditional networks in time-critical applications. Early attempts to naively replace traditional networks with wireless networks in supporting collaborative applications have produced less than acceptable results. In this paper, we show that the performance of various Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) modules highly depends on the architecture of the employed wireless network and that selecting a proper configuration leads to significant performance improvements comparable to those obtained in wired networks.