Decentralized Collaborative Editing
Second International Conference on Innovative and Intelligent Information Technologies – IC3IT’26
- March 26-28, 2026
- Medina Solaria & Thalasso, Hammamet – Tunisia
Achour Mostéfaoui is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rennes (France).
Title: Decentralized Collaborative Editing
Abstract:
Distributed real-time editors made real-time editing easy for millions of users. However, main stream editors rely on Cloud services to mediate sessions raising privacy and scalability issues. Decentralized editors tackle privacy issues but scalability issues remains. We aim to build a decentralized editor that allows real-time editing anytime, anywhere, whatever is the number of participants. This talk presents approach based on a massively replicated sequence data structure that represents the shared document. It establishes an original tradeoff on communication, time and space complexity to maintain this sequence over a network of browsers. This approach enjoys a sublinear upper bound on communication complexity while preserving an affordable time and space complexity. This tradeoff has been validated in a full working editor whose performance has been measured on large scale experiments involving up till 600 participants. As expected, the results show a traffic increasing as O((log I)^2.ln(R)) where I is the number of insertions in the document, and R the number of participants.
Short bio :
Achour Mostéfaoui is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rennes (France). He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1991 and his Ph.D. in 1994, both from the University of Rennes. He is a member of the IRISA/INRIA research laboratory, where he heads the WIDE research team. He has supervised several Master’s programs in Computer Science at the Universities of Nantes and Rennes. His main research interests include distributed algorithms, distributed computability, and the foundations of distributed computing. He has published more than 150 journal and conference papers.