Internet Technologies and Infrastructure for Asia-Wide Distance Education

SOI Asia project aims at Asia-wide distance education development with its design emphasizing on new model of network technologies that provides wide-coverage high-quality network to support high-quality distance education instead of relying on the available Internet connectivity with inadequate quality. A 13-Mbps unidirectional broadcast satellite covers Asia region enabling lecture sharing among student sites. IPv6 multicast overlay network is established by UDLR and IPv6 tunnel technologies to create a virtual network connecting lecturer-site and student-sites on top of network heterogeneity. Bandwidth optimization and scalability are achieved by IPv6 multicast. QoS using policy routing and ALTQ utilizes and manages bandwidth to ensure high quality lectures. Experiment results show that SOI Asia environment delivers better quality streams with stable rate, high correlation, low data loss and jitter compared to the available Internet connectivity. These design aspects, technology model and experimental results can be the considerations of future region-wide distance education development