A Novel Hyper-Cast Approach to Enable Cloud-Based Virtual Classroom Applications

In this paper, we explore the possibility of enabling cloud-based virtual classroom applications providing the advantages of computational scalability and access from any end device. In particular, we investigate a virtual classroom application in which the classroom including teacher, students and activities are rendered on the cloud, with each student view captured and streamed to students' end devices. By identifying that many student views may share common pixels, we design a novel hyper-cast system so that common pixels can be transmitted by a single broadcast stream while the residual pixels for individual student view can be transmitted by unicast in cellular networks. The hyper-cast approach can significantly reduce total bitrate needed, and therefore decrease cloud cost and cellular bandwidth. Simulation results show that the proposed hyper-cast technique can save up to 44.6% bitrate compared to traditional cloud-based approach.