Note on remote laboratory access: a networking perspective

Abstract

Remote Laboratory Access in education has become a focus of Universities and other educators. This work addresses issues of implementing a scalable remote-laboratory access system. The main requirements which are considered include: to developed generic solutions allowing access to many different hosts via a common interface, straightforward student use, fast experiment setup and minimal configuration requirements. The particular focus of this paper is the networking aspect of remote laboratory access. A general discussion of alternatives is followed by specific implementation details of a prototype system. The core component of this system is the Remote Access Gateway which authenticates users and establishes end-to-end connections between students and experiments.