Peer-to-peer collaboration in PeCoCC framework

Computer-supported collaborative learning is an important domain of e-learning dealing with researching efficient methods to encourage people to learn together with the help of their computers. Many learning environments support this kind of collaboration and provide several applications to fulfill the needs for efficient learning. These learning environments are usually client-server based solutions, where the users have to access the responsible server to get the services and data they need. This fact leads to two main problems of scalability and single point of failure. Because of its structure, which is similar to the collaborative learning network, the peer-to-peer technology is suggested as a solution for these problems. This paper introduces a framework for using Peer-to-Peer communications, protocols and services in the area of computer-supported collaborative learning. It consists of four layers and includes different Peer-to-Peer modules, which will be selected according to the application requirements. It also provides a messaging system, which uses the overlay-multicasting protocols of the supported Peer-to-Peer modules. This paper shows the advantage of the proposed framework.