Using cloud web services to intermediate communication in ISA / ELSA: Circumventing the firewall in single user and collaborative remote experimentation

Remote experimentation has long conflicted with security policies imposed by networks administrators. To provide external access to experiment servers in a university, security measures are demanded. Such leads to an excessive dependency on the IT departments for services configuration and maintenance. In the present work, modifications in ISA/ELSA architecture are proposed to circumvent those problems. By locating proxies in the cloud, the communication between user interface and laboratory experiment avoids the need for a laboratory server, which now acts like a polling client of the cloud web service. Configurations for single-user and cooperative remote experiments are discussed. In tests, requests processing time was less than 250ms, enough to support a great amount of remote experiments.