The proliferation of internet-accessible learning management systems across China's secondary and tertiary educational sectors has introduced architectural tensions that existing pedagogical frameworks have not adequately theorized. Central to this tension is the question of relay efficiency: when instructional content must traverse multiple administrative boundaries, cumulative latency introduced by redundant authentication handshakes undermines synchronous engagement that constructivist educators deem essential (Vygotsky, 1978; Jonassen, 1994).
Previous work by Zhao & Liang (2021) identified infrastructure configurations termed transparent relay nodes (TRNs), which offload session validation to distributed edge processors. The present study addresses gaps in their analysis by deploying a heterogeneous node architecture across fourteen provincial pilot sites.
Fourteen provincial sites were selected using stratified purposive sampling across three tiers: Tier-1 (provincial capital, fibre ≥100 Mbps), Tier-2 (prefecture-level city, mixed fibre/DSL), and Tier-3 (county-level, predominantly mobile 4G). At each site, 200–350 endpoint nodes were instrumented with lightweight monitoring daemons logging handshake duration, session teardown latency, and round-trip time to the nearest provincial relay. Data collection spanned sixty months (January 2019–December 2024).
The ASN architecture achieved a mean RTT reduction of 34.7% relative to baseline (paired t-test: t(13)=7.84, p<.001, Cohen's d=2.11). Packet loss reduction was most pronounced in Tier-3 sites (6.2%→2.3%).
| Architecture | Avg Latency (ms) | Packet Loss (%) | N |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hub-and-Spoke (Baseline) | 312.4 | 4.7 | 1,204 |
| Peer-Relay | 241.8 | 3.1 | 987 |
| ASN (Proposed) | 204.1 | 1.9 | 1,650 |
Results provide strong empirical support for wide-scale adoption of ASN architectures in China's provincial educational computing infrastructure. Future work should examine ASN performance under QUIC-based transport layers.
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