Scalable distributed collaborative editing for 3D models using conflict-free data structure

Abstract

Consistent maintenance in collaborative editing is one of the most important problems in distributed systems. So many papers have proposed various approaches to this issue, but most of them are for documents, and there are a few for 3D models. We propose a data structure, called ChainVoxel, and operations on it for scalable distributed collaborative editing systems for 3D models. It is based on the conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT). ChainVoxel is implemented by a chained hash table for collision resolution while editing by multiple users. It guarantees the eventual consistency for updating a shared 3D model without mutual exclusion. We analysed our prototype regarding the size of ChainVoxel and the number of operations. We also conducted simulations to compare our prototype with a consensus-based implementation. Our prototype shows the scalability regarding the number of messages and steps for executing operations.