Simulations of the VISIR Open Lab Platform

This paper presents a queue simulation of a remote laboratory based on the VISIR Open Lab Platform designed at Blekinge Institute of Technology. A model of this VISIR laboratory and statistical distributions of how users interact with the system based on real log files are presented. The system is then simulated in order to determine how many concurrent students that can be allowed to use the laboratory while at the same time keeping a low response time to ensure the quality of the service. The results show, in a worst case setup with approximately 300 ms response time per experiment, that roughly 100 concurrent users is an upper limit to ensure an average response time below 2 s. The results also show that raising the limit of the desired experiment response time does not necessarily increase the number allowed concurrent users significantly once the system is saturated. However, improving the experiment response time can significantly increase the number of users that can simultaneously be connected.