
group collaboration, management and sharing of 
resources for a constructivist approach to the 
learning. One scenario of such motive is briefly 
explained as below. In the traditional e-Learning 
system, single learning management server is 
responsible for handling large number of users 
which limits the problem of scalability, overhead, 
and inefficient use of resources. Besides that the 
interest of the different learner may be different and 
so that it is very difficult to do a collaborative work. 
If there is lack of collaboration then a user may feel 
lonely and there is chance of leaving the system and 
hence the effectiveness of the learning system will 
be significantly reduced.  These limitations are 
inevitable even if it is assumed that if there is only a 
single common interest group, like learners of a 
single class room, in the client-server based e-
Learning system. Therefore it is interesting to group 
the users of e-Learning system according to their 
interest and apply decentralized P2P technology 
within and among such groups. This approach will 
result better resource utilization because every peer 
can contribute their resources and more interactive 
ness because each peer can communicate in two 
ways either group mode via overlay multicasting or 
peer mode with other peer.  
There are many users in the realistic large 
learning domain and we assume that these users 
represent the node or peer in the overlay network 
(Zhang and Hu, 2003). Different peers may have 
different interest so peers having common interest 
will be organized together to form a group. There 
will be two possibilities; either the peer may join the 
already existing group or peer may create its own 
group and other peers may join it later. So there will 
be two categories of the users in the group creators 
or leaders and the normal users. For simplicity, if we 
assume that learning will be done by chatting (not 
limited to this) then interactive e-learning scenario in 
such particular case will be as follows:  
First the creator, say c1, will create a group 
according to its interest, say computer network, and 
seeking for the other interested peers. If other peer, 
say p1, in the overlay network also have the same 
interest in the computer network, it will first find out 
the creator ‘c1’ and then pop-up chat window will 
appear for the learning by chatting. Similarly if other 
peers having same interest may find the group and 
join the group learning process. As shown in the 
Figure 2, there will be many possible cases. Most 
likely case is that one peer may have more than one 
interest and would like to participate in on the 
multiple groups. For example peer ‘p1’ may have 
common interest in the computer network and it is 
already the member of the group ‘g1’, peer p1 may 
also have interest in the database design so it may 
wish to join the database group, say g2, (at the same 
time) and get involved in the learning process.  
Another likely case will be that there will be 
more than one groups having nearly common 
interest and either members or groups leaders may 
wish to merge these groups. It is also interesting to 
consider peer in a particular group may leave the 
group and or may wish to create another group 
having different interest than that of the current 
group and advertise its group members.  
Briefly, framework of P2P groups’ management 
mechanisms (interest based group formation, 
efficient group communication and groups 
management) will be proposed (potential use in 
collaborative learning) to incorporate interactive 
ness among the members, allow the efficient use of 
resources reducing the overhead in the server and 
single point of failure, and add scalability, 
decentralization and many more.  
Rest of the paper is organized as below. Section 
2 describes the statement of the problem and section 
3 discusses about the objective and scope of this 
work. Section 4 explains briefly about the related 
literature on the P2P technology and grouping 
mechanisms. Finally section 5 of this paper 
discusses about the proposed system. Peer-to-Peer 
interest based grouping mechanism, efficient data 
delivery mechanism and management mechanisms, 
and learning environment model are also included in 
last section. 
2 PROBLEM STATEMENT  
Existing Client-Server (C/S) based e-Learning 
systems are facing many problems like inefficient 
use of resources, single point overhead and failure, 
limited interaction among the members, scalability 
etc. With these limitations, C/S based e-Learning 
could not be significant alternative to the traditional 
classroom-based learning. P2P technology, which is 
a hot technology recently for the online music and 
file sharing, has potential applications on the e-
Learning as well. However, to date, there is very 
limited use of P2P in the e-Learning. From 
instructors’ point of view, it is challenging and 
interesting to create interest based group, sub-group 
formation, and merging groups having similar 
interest. From the students’ point of view, the 
challenge is to join into the group having specific 
interest and to get the multiple group membership. 
Common challenge for both is to efficiently 
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