Evaluation of IP Multimedia Subsystem based Mobile Mass Examination System

Published Online May 2012 in MECS

In the recent years with the advancement of mobile wireless technologies, there is a significant shift in the academic from traditional way of teaching and examination pattern to mobile learning environment. Several universities incorporated the mobile technology into their teaching and learning environment and recognizes the potential of mobile technologies as an effective medium for teaching and assessment tools especially when there are mass students appeared in an exam (for example entrance exam for a university. There are already several research works published[1][2][3] on online E-exam systems to simplify the assessment process by automatic marking which significantly reduce the complex paper assessment work especially when there are mass students appeared in an exam. However, little research has been done on effect of the use of ubiquitous devices for teaching and learning. To investigate how far the concept of mobile exam and assessment as shown in figure 1 is accepted by the students and faculty members in King Abdul Aziz

University, Jeddah, KSA, questionnaires are used which are analyzed and result are then reported in this paper.

Figure 1 IMS-based mobile exam scemniro [4]

Session initial protocol (SIP) based IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as shown in figure 2 is considered as the foundation stone for Next generation Network (NGN). The IMS platform is based on three layered architecture design, The IMS core network consists of mainly Transport layer, Control layer and Application layer. SIP has emerged as the vital technology for controlling communication in IP-based Networks. IMS is best described as the glue between the “global” applications world (Internet) and the mobile world. Using IMS third party developers can easy deploy their applications over mobile networks [4]. According to the standards, IMS is defined in the form of reference architecture to enable delivery of next-generation communication services of voice, data, video, wireless, and mobility over an Internet Protocol (IP) network [5]. Using IMS, applications can combine voice, text, pictures, and video in seamless call sessions, offering significant ease-of-use to subscribers and allowing service providers to drive branding through a common interface, while substantially reducing operating costs [5]. Application development cost can dramatically reduce as IMS services are facilitated by rich web development tools such as Java environments, VoiceXML forms, and other XML (eXtensible Markup Language) derivatives [5].

Figure 2. IMS architectural diagram Source [18]

Component based development (CBD) is ideal choices for developing mobile application, as CBD model encourage assemblies of components for systems development instead of building everything from scratch. CBD technologies comprised of implementing a component into a system through its well defined interfaces [6]. Using well-defined interfaces, a component interact with other components to accomplish a partial function of the system.

The inner structure of the component and the implementation of the interfaces are hidden to the outside. Therefore, CBSE enables a distributed and independent development of components as well as a straightforward replacement of a component by a different component in large-scale systems [7]. CBD support the development of components as reusable entities and software developers need not to reinvent the wheel if wheel is already available in the market which helps in reducing the software development time and cost as well.

We apply this model on Mobile Mass Examination (MoMEx) system that is an application attracting the interest of educational authorities around the world due to its potential convenience. MoMEx also includes an activity management application for the faculty that allows them to control the examination process in real time and to view all student data.

The paper is organized as follows: sections II covers related work Section III illustrates Case Study. Section IV contains the evaluation Section V contains Functionality recommendation for MoMEx system after analyzing students and faculty questionnaire and Section VI conclusion and future work.

II Related Work

In order to know the usage of smart phone in universities to support education, authors [8] designed and implemented several mobile based educational services at VaÈxjoÈ University. The aim of the research is to know which content and services could be delivered to the smart phones for learning and communication in context of university studies, In their project 41 students from two different courses participated for a period of three months, a survey was conducted to know the support of the services provided on smart phone, results indicated that students perceived the services as useful to learning; interestingly, and helpful in their learning. In the paper the author [8] recommended mobile services to be implemented in higher education to improve the usability, institutional support and tailored educational content purposes.

The author [9] in his research finds the state of art tools and benefits of mobile wireless technology usage in higher education across the globe. Three popular mobile wireless technologies are used in higher education and identified that each one requires different technical infrastructure to access to network resources, the three technologies they explored were wireless computers, PDAs, and web-enabled mobile phones. Issues related to each three technologies must be study before it implemented in the higher education and one such issue is security. How to achieve educational goals administrators, educators, and students must think critically to determine how to use the new technologies without it is virtually impossible to study any subject of mobile wireless technologies in higher education [9].

Most of the Mobile Learning Applications uses multimedia data such as video clips, images and documents, the authors [8] in their research analyzed and investigated for a need of fast and reliable data storage and retrieval. [10] proposed a Database Management Architecture for an Innovative Evaluation System based on Mobile Learning Applications for faster data storage and retrieval. Emphases of the investigation were for high throughput so as to support multimedia for Mobile Learning Applications development.