WebLab: A Generic Architecture for Remote Laboratories

Remote laboratories have earlier been proposed to allow sharing and better utilization of experiment resources. However, wide -scale acceptability depends on, among other things, a framework to manage all the tasks associated with a laboratory. The need for such a laboratory is even more important in developing countries where infrastructural resources are limited and improving the resource utilization is important. We propose a Web based 3-tier architecture (WebLab) that provides shared batch mode access to the experiments over low-bandwidth networks to maximize the laboratory utilization. A generic experiment is modeled as a set of inputs, outputs, and constraints. A laboratory is modeled as a collection of experiments sharing a common administrative and access policy. A lab/experiment registration toolkit is designed to capture the metadata for the labs and experiments with minimal programming involved. This allows for a rapid and standardized integration of the experiments with the WebLab. A proof of concept lab is implemented on this architecture.