Impact of Multicast Protocols on Synchronous Distance Education

This paper focuses on multicast protocols that were used to improve the tools that are effectively in use on Internet. The most adequate transmission technology for the emerging Internet applications especially for online collaboration and distance learning is multicast. These applications require one-to-many or many-to-many communication which is efficiently supported by IP multicast. Multicast solves a duplication of a packet which single copy of sender´s packet pass over any link in the network in order to be delivered to all members/receivers of a certain group and be copied by network infrastructure only when paths diverge. By this way multicast reduces the amount of duplicate traffic and improves the quality of applications. Without IP multicast, applications which require a big volume of data to be transmitted, as scientific data distribution and visualization, are almost impossible to build and work. The growing interest and demand for this technology requires an IP multicast to be implemented ubiquitously. In the last few years there has been an intensive activity related to the development of multicast. The result of these efforts is mature, stable and ready-to-deploy IP multicast implementation on routers/switches. The changing face of an education moves distance on a continuing education within the Internet. Distance learning with multicast technology is studied and a designed distance learning system is expanded within the paper