Management of multimedia data on a distributed e-learning system

We have proposed and implemented a distributed e-Learning system based on P2P architecture. In this system, contents are held by agents which are distributed among all nodes. These agents migrate to requesting user's node and serve contents. These contents can include multimedia data, such as audio and video. If one agent holds entire multimedia data, they cannot be played until completing a migration of the agent. As a solution for this issue, we divide multimedia data into multiple fragments by time series and individual agent holds each fragment. Therefore, not only the start of playing multimedia data is earlier, but also the entire download time is shorter because users can download these fragments from many nodes at the same time. We have confirmed the effectivity of this method by experiments.