Using Identity Provider and Automatic Resource Management to Improve a Remote Networking Lab

Scientific research and development on remote laboratories has spectacularly increased since the past decade due to the limitations of the traditional lab sessions (e.g., high cost of equipment, scarce flexibility, limited student development, etc.). To this extent, we describe the developments carried out to improve the management and remote access of a networking laboratory called Ciscolab deployed at the University of Huelva (Spain). The goal of these improvements have been to automatically manage and share hardware resources among remote students, while providing a high-level security to maintain an e-learning laboratory for educational purposes. The contribution to this field consisted in integrating an institution's Identity Provider (IdP) into a Meeting Room Booking System (MRBS) to provide a safe and deterministic access to the remote equipment by authorized students. In addition, we developed an automated maintenance system including periodic backups in the cloud and scheduled reboots of the networking systems. As a result of the lab automation, we have been able to track the student work. This helped us to detect the students' strengths and weaknesses by analyzing their command history during their practice sessions. So the experimentation was aimed at presenting the first results after the interaction of a group of students with the remote lab during a semester of evaluation.