Open to the users' needs : combining user-centered design, standards and open source software

This case study introduces our continuous work to enhance the virtual classroom in order to provide faculty and students with an environment open to their needs, compliant with learning standards and, therefore compatible with other e-learning environments, and based on open source software. The result is a modulable, sustainable and interoperable learning environment that can be adapted to different teaching and learning situations by incorporating the LMS integrated tools as well as wikis, blogs, forums and Moodle activities among others.

Enhanced multi-layer protection in multi-service GMPLS networks

This paper focuses on QoS routing with protection in an MPLS network over an optical layer. In this multi-layer scenario each layer deploys its own fault management methods. A partially protected optical layer is proposed and the rest of the network is protected at the MPLS layer. New protection schemes that avoid protection duplications are proposed. Moreover, this paper also introduces a new traffic classification based on the level of reliability. The failure impact is evaluated in terms of recovery time depending on the traffic class. The proposed schemes also include a novel variation of minimum interference routing and shared segment backup computation. A complete set of experiments proves that the proposed schemes are more efficient as compared to the previous ones, in terms of resources used to protect the network, failure impact and the request rejection ratio