A P2P approach to Streaming Multimedia Contents in a F-learning Oriented Platform

In this paper a new distributed platform is proposed. The aim of the platform is providing a very simple environment which is able to share the media required in a synchronous e-learning session or in a video conference, i.e., video and audio captured streams, slide sequences and the mouse movement when the mouse pointer is over a shared slide. By using a source routing strategy every peer transmits the captured streams over one or multiple paths that reach all the multimedia session participants. With this distributed approach we are able to increase the number of participants, to avoid limitations due to the client-server bottleneck and to reduce the network load per participant in comparison to a client-server architecture with unicast communications. The proposed structure also integrates and takes advantage of the local multicast network infrastructures