A general framework for remote laboratory access: A standarization point of view

Laboratory work, in the disciplines of engineering and physical sciences, has a strong impact on students' learning outcomes and it is considered to be at the heart of learning. Hardware experimental environment is usually treated as an exclusive resource for single user usage. However, the actual test run time is rather short and most of the time is wasted leaving these costly resources idle. With the increased usage of electronic kits in the educational laboratories, and the need for training a huge number of students on these kits, a cost-effective solution is the development of general framework for remote lab access. Such laboratories are very convenient and effective for learning hardware design concepts and elaborating hardware-based graduation projects. This paper addresses the hardware (HW) and software (SW) tools necessary for building a general framework for remote laboratory access. The proposed system allows performing experiments remotely across the Internet via web interface as well as locally in the classroom. In addition, it introduces enhancements for the remote lab activities leading to improving its performance and makes the data transfer more secure.