On The Application Of P2P Technology In Large-Scale Online Open Courseware Initiatives

Because of the fierce competition in the modern society, people are more eager to recharge themselves to increase their competitiveness. While at the same time, the rapid development of information technology has boosted the growth of OCW (Open Courseware) initiatives. Because OCW is non-for-profit, in order to sustain the OCW in a large-scale, the cost of providing access to OCW should be under control. The P2P technology, which can reduce the load of the server dramatically with a high scalability, is becoming more and more popular. Thus there is actual significance to apply the P2P technology in delivering OCW.This paper is about the research of the application of P2P technology in OCW initiatives. At first, the paper presents a large-scale survey focusing on the effectiveness of the P2P technology in the wild. After analyzing the data collected from more than 1700 broadband hosts in China, the paper presents a quantitative analysis of the maxium code rate in the streaming system and the gain that can be achieved by applying the P2P technology in the residential network environment. The survey also indicated the effectiveness of applying P2P technology in the OCW initiatives.Then by examing the needs of existing P2P applications, the paper designs and implements a P2P Computing Service Platform (PCSP). This platform is based on the abstraction and encapsulation of the common components of various P2P applications, providing a shared tracker server service; peer and peer group manage service. Moreover, the platform provides the pipe service, which can create the communication links between peers in the complex network environment. The PCSP can be used in various P2P applications. By using the service provided by the PCSP, the developers can easily develop and deploy a new P2P application.Finally, based on the PCSP platform, this paper designed and developed a P2P VOD system for OCW delivery. The performance of the VOD system are also presented, which showed the effectiveness of the PCSP.