Analysis of Multimedia Communication Issues in the Immersive Smart Classroom System – A Control Center Approach

Abstract

Abstract Multimedia communication issues are a common occurrence during e-Learning sessions. The issues are not only due to human errors but also due equipment, bandwidth, server and network problems. As our Smart classroom e-Learning system uses many audio/video and display equipment to achieve multi-perspective gaze aligned immersive experience [1, 2], there are many chances of communication errors due to equipment and setup failures. Since a problem might occur due to a failure at any of the participating node and users like professors or students usually are not technically qualified; it’s time consuming effort to troubleshoot, localize and to fix these communication issues. The Control center tracks the status of all the equipment, bandwidth and network of each computer at each classroom including the server and presents the data in a rich interactive GUI in real-time and hence it becomes much easier for the administrators to identify, localize, and fix all the issues at the earliest to ensure the smooth operation of the e-Learning session. During our development and testing phases we have used the control center extensively to debug the setup issues of our e-Learning system to save time. In this paper we describe the Control Center tool of our Smart classroom system along with the analysis of audio/video issues and related troubleshooting work-flows.