A dependable and economic service for long-life e-learning applications in grid environments

Abstract

Developing highly available, reliable, scalable and mobile educational systems are so difficult or impossible in the client-server and web service architectures. On the other hand, a grid environment is such a large distributed system that it supports large numbers of distributed resources sharing. The grid environment can be used as a good platform for the long-life, online and mobile educational applications which need high availability, reliability and scalability. The possibility of failure occurrence on the educational resources during a running educational application on the grid environment is not negligible. This paper proposes a dependable and economic learning service in grid systems. The other focus in this paper is to minimize educational resource consumption and consequently decrease the cost of requested learning services by the learners in the economic grid. A hybrid and dynamic resource management method is used to improve the availability, reliability, scalability and stability of learning service with low resource consumption. An analytical approach, Markov model, is used to show the availability, reliability, stability improvement in the proposed method.