Network Characterization for Delivering Multimedia-based Learning in Rural Areas

Multimedia technology has been contributing much advancement in education sector within the last decade. Digital Learning - Lesson Study (DL-LS) is a lesson study, a learning approach with a target to improve education sector, i.e. to improve teacher quality, which is conducted through the use of multimedia technology. With this technology, open lesson as a phase in the lesson study is conducted in the form of real-time multimedia delivery over Internet between real classroom and virtual classroom, which is usually located in remote area. Nevertheless, conducting multimedia-based learning in rural areas covers several problems due to their limited network resources. Our observation revealed that limited available network bandwidth becomes an important issue in the real-time multimedia delivery, particularly in rural areas. This paper aims to investigate the network characterization for delivering real-time multimedia-based learning in rural areas. Contribution of this paper is a network analysis for multimedia-based learning in rural areas which is presented based-on a simulation study with data support collected from a network test bed. Index Terms - Internet multimedia technology, quality of service, network characterization, digital learning.