An Integrated P2P Framework for E-Learning

Abstract: The paper is concerned with the design and development of a P2P Presentation System (P2P-PS) for live streaming of lectures coupled with a shareable whiteboard. Video streaming uses a data-driven modified mesh architecture which supports dynamic fanout. The whiteboard may be used in synchronization with an active video streaming session. It is shared by both the presenter and the participants in the audience for graphic illustrations during the lecture. P2P-PS provides an important feature called {\em ask doubt} that allows any participant to send a query (or a doubt) during an active presentation session. The query is disseminated to all other peers by preserving the causality between {\em ask doubt} and its resolution. A buffered approach is employed to boost the performance of the whiteboard. The simulations experiments were performed with over 1000 peer nodes on Emulab using 200 physical nodes. The results show that the proposed overlay eventually stabilizes even in the presence of a churning rate of up to 30\%. The maximum path length being just six hops. The estimated throughput is found to be close to our theoretical results.