A peer-to-peer system to provide Internet-based asynchronous educational services

摘要

We propose a peer-to-peer architecture for a distributed system that provides asynchronous educational services at the same time as guaranteeing the best expected response time. We consider the scenario in which the requested services are satisfied by transferring the appropriate files to the requesting site. The system consists of a distributed group of mirror sites that are known by each other. Users may connect to any of the servers in the system, and that initial server routes it to one of the known mirror sites (possibly itself) with the goal of achieving load balance. The dispatching policy takes into consideration the overall distribution of expected requests that may arrive to each particular server, as well as the expected distribution of particular data objects to be transferred to requesting sites. We discuss the system assumptions and the dispatching policy to assign requests to a particular mirror site in a peer-to-peer fashion. We also prove that the dispatching policy being proposed achieves load balancing of the system.