Managing floors bears similarities to the problems of managing mutually exclusive access to shared zones or objects, cf. However, its most prominent technical heritage is concurrency control methodology known from transactional database access. Depending on its realization, floor control is located anywhere between the transportation and application layer, yet typically existing applications integrate floor control in the application layer. Such sessions can vary in scale and configuration depending on many parameters characterizing participants and media in use. However, an adaptive and comprehensive control service must obey many causally related parameters of the session context, causing protocol overhead.
Media can be lossy or lossless and impose real-time requirements or allow for jitter.
Floor control strategies need to adjust to such lower level service guarantees and characteristics. Furthermore, it must work distributedly, yielding resiliency, efficiency and hence responsiveness. The protocol serving behind the implementation must ensure correctness, liveness, and preemption in floor assignment. Ultimately servicing users, usability of automatic floor control provision must be ensured to yield acceptance. This can be achieved by making floor control adjustable and intelligible through the user-interface, yet its operation transparent by hiding internal control actions.