Design and Implementation of a Heterogeneous Distributed Database System for Students Absence Automation Using Portable Devices

Abstract

Students’ absence recording is a fundamental daily process that occurs within colleges, often relying on paper forms, which is inefficient when the college administration wants to gather absences from multiple remote departments (sites) and calculate the college’s students’ absence rates. In response to these challenges, a heterogeneous distributed database system was designed to declare and automate student absences in the colleges using smartphones or laptops and send absences in real-time from inside lecture halls or laboratories in departments to the college administration to generate absence reports. The system employed a client-server model to deliver services to the college and its various departments through the local area network (LAN) and the Internet. MSSQL database tables were designed and fragmented across college sites using horizontal fragmentation technology and then encrypted with the AES265 algorithm. The proposed system used private SQLite or MSSQL databases for the lecture’s Android or Windows devices. On the other hand, college administration staff used a secure website built with ASP.NET to access the MySQL database server, which contains the absence table populated from all sites. The system was protected against false absence declarations by utilizing the local server’s timing factor, allowing the lecturer only to declare absences on specific days and times. The experimental results showed high reliability and accuracy of the system and high satisfaction among the users about achieving the desired goals. The findings demonstrated a strong preference for the system among the lecturers over other systems that relied on student, biometric, and AI-based devices. At the same time, the college administration staff preferred automatic absence collection using the distributed design of the system over manual collection.