PPClass - a classroom lecture broadcast platform based on P2P streaming technology

This work-in-progress paper reports a project named PPClass conducted in the Continuing Education College of SJTU (Shanghai Jiaotong University), which is to construct a classroom lecture broadcast service for the generic public to access the high quality educational resource available in SJTU. Due to the cost-effectiveness of the P2P streaming technology in serving large scale audiences, we adopted it as the fundamental stream delivery mechanism. After a through comparison of currently available open source p2p streaming implementations, we chose iGridMedia as the base of our work because of the leading edge p2p streaming algorithm it embodies as well as its unique latency guarantee feature. An early demo has been successfully implemented by integrating iGridMedia with our own lecture capture programs and a browser based player. We present in this paper the rationale of the selected technical approach, the system design and future directions of PPClass.