Facing the Digital-Divide through a Quality of Service Distributed System in Real-Time Remote Cooperative Learning

The digital-divide problem is particularly limitative in case of cooperative remote activities, such as group working in e/m-Learning. On the one hand, a user should benefit from schooling services independently of his location; on the other hand, good quality real-time interactions with other pupils ought to be guaranteed. The problem is also getting more and more serious, since modern applications are characterized by an ever increasing bandwidth demand. Only further decisive technological advances will fill the gap of the digital divide, yet an effective management of bandwidth distribution through Quality of Service (QoS) techniques, for instance, can highly improve the situation. This paper presents a QoS architecture applied to the considered environment and describes how remote groups can be handled with in order to obtain an overall quality improvement.