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Unicast vs. multicast over wireless: a cross-disciplinary mindshare for educational application researchers

Published: 26 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

As the state of learning technology advances, there is a pressing need to understand how we can best utilize and compensate for the bandwidth available to us over wireless networks. TCP traffic is ill-designed for an environment that subjects it to random packet loss, and because of which, it is plagued by congestion issues, unfairness, and insufficient bandwidth. While IP multicast traffic is not without its own burdens, such as lower overall throughput and "bursty" packet loss, we have found that it is often an appropriate and underutilized medium for data distribution in classroom-centric applications. We present the pros and cons of both unicast and multicast transmissions over wireless, follow with anecdotal evidence on what has worked in the past, and conclude with a discussion of the strategy we have taken and our future directions. This paper is intended to function as a means for distilling many years of work in understanding the properties of 802.11 wireless networks in the communications field, and transferring that knowledge to the field of computational technology for advancing CS education.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Dynamic and scalable provisioning in wireless mesh networks to efficiently support multi-user killer-applications with high-demand of resources2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)10.1109/ICC.2012.6364622(1388-1392)Online publication date: Jun-2012
  • (2007)Testing collaborative traffic over wireless protocols2007 37th annual frontiers in education conference - global engineering: knowledge without borders, opportunities without passports10.1109/FIE.2007.4417895(F4J-11-F4J-16)Online publication date: Oct-2007

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ITICSE '06: Proceedings of the 11th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
      June 2006
      390 pages
      ISBN:1595930558
      DOI:10.1145/1140124
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 26 June 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. collaborative learning
      2. educational technology
      3. multicast
      4. wireless

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      • (2012)Dynamic and scalable provisioning in wireless mesh networks to efficiently support multi-user killer-applications with high-demand of resources2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)10.1109/ICC.2012.6364622(1388-1392)Online publication date: Jun-2012
      • (2007)Testing collaborative traffic over wireless protocols2007 37th annual frontiers in education conference - global engineering: knowledge without borders, opportunities without passports10.1109/FIE.2007.4417895(F4J-11-F4J-16)Online publication date: Oct-2007

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