Evaluating and enhancing the performance of streaming media services in E-learning system

Abstract

Streaming media services are powerful tools for delivering instruction content to online learners in E-learning System. However, if the capacity and efficiency of streaming server or network bandwidth is not sufficient for a lot of media files, the student have to wait the curriculum for a long time. So this paper tries to deal with streaming media communication in E-learning system, and the focus is on evaluating and enhancing the performance of streaming media services. Our experiments have demonstrated that the Disk I/O will bear the brunt of one bottleneck of server, followed by the network bandwidth while the server delivers the movies. And those problems should be solved by good services from E-learning systems, so we present a multi-tier architecture for E-learning system. In such a system, streaming server sends performance log to database server periodically, and different contents are stored in different servers, on which we can ensure the normal operation of the streaming media services to provide a stable learning environment for students. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.