Untact Era…Il-Sung Kim, Study on Improvement of Communication Environment for Remote Classes

It was belatedly reported that North Korea is working on improving the distance education environment using a load balance method. The new coronavirus (Corona 19) seems to be responding to the increased demand for distance education due to the prolonged period.

“One way to improve the response characteristics of remote education service system requests” published in Kim Il-Sung University Academic Journal Vol.66 No.3 (2020) says, “Remote education volunteers receive requests from thousands of learners and Requests from the remote education system must be processed without interruption in real time. “We must analyze the request response characteristics of the remote education operating system and use (use) a load distribution method to distribute the request load to improve the capacity to process requests for volunteers.” Said.

Load balancing is a network technology that distributes the load to multiple servers prepared in advance in order to prevent the performance of the server from deteriorating due to crowding of traffic on the web server. Through this, the server can provide services normally without slowing down or delay processing even with a large amount of traffic.

Load balancing has been used for a long time to effectively cope with increasing traffic.

It seems that the reason that North Korea started related research belatedly is because the number of Internet or intranet users has increased, unlike before.

North Korea is known to have disrupted normal classes due to the prolonged Corona 19, and remote classes are being conducted in some areas, and the number of classes through mobile has increased significantly.

The thesis said, “We discussed how to use Apache service as a load controller and distribute incoming requests to multiple Tomcat entities.” We have confirmed that the average request processing time is reduced by approximately one-third.”

It is said that it is most efficient to load balance using two additional servers.

However, in order to improve the distance education in North Korea, it seems more necessary to improve the Internet environment, server and computer hardware performance than load balancing.

Looking at the experimental data shown in the paper, it took up to about 15 seconds to load both the registration and learning pages, and up to 26 seconds for the registration and test pages. For reference, the Seoul remote class platform NEW SSEM took about 2 seconds to load the main page. You can guess that the Internet environment in North Korea is very poor.

For reference, it is known that the Internet speed in North Korea is 60 to 70 Mbps in certain areas of Pyongyang and 10 Mbps in rural areas.

In addition, the paper revealed that the experimental server OS was’Linux 2.6.32-358-el6_x86_64′. The kernel was released in 2013 and is currently an old version with various support discontinued including updates.

The computer used for the test here has an Intel Core-i3 3240 CPU and about 1.7GB of Ram. The Core-i3 3240 was launched in 2012 by US semiconductor company Intel, and 1.7G of RAM is not enough to run the latest programs.

Considering that the computers, servers, and Internet environments used for experiments in North Korea’s top universities are quite outdated, the computer environment for ordinary residents is expected to be worse.

On the other hand, North Korea adopted the’Remote Education Act’ at the 14th 3rd meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly in April last year, laying the legal foundation for expanding and developing online education.