Designing Grid services for multimedia streaming in an e-learning environment

Next generation e-learning platforms will support cooperative use of geographically distributed educational resources as an aggregated environment, thus enabling a more effective knowledge exchange. Sharing this goal, our research activity addresses the definition and implementation of a service-based infrastructure for content distribution and multimedia streaming. The proposed architecture provides enough flexibility, extensibility, and scalability to cope with the ever-increasing heterogeneity and mobility of edge devices. In this paper, we initially illustrate the general objectives and requirements in the development of an e-learning oriented application for multimedia content discovery, access, and distribution in a virtual community. Architectural considerations have motivated the use of Grid technologies as they provide access to resources and services of different administrative domains in a transparent, seamless, and secure way. The Grid-based architecture has been endowed with a number of services including discovery and streaming of multimedia objects, multimedia content update, quality of service (QoS) management, and support for user authentication and authorization. A multimedia application based on the architecture is described and evaluated on a multi-domain network.