Software Architecture for Multi-User Multiplexing to Enhance Scalability in IoT-Based Remote Labs

Remote Labs refer to an end-to-end system, including hardware and software built to access scientific equipment and resources remotely. The software platform built for such purposes needs to be robust enough to handle the communication of inputs and outputs between the client and the hardware nodes with minimal latency and simultaneously provide a seamless user experience. This paper highlights the importance of scalability in Remote Labs and presents multi-user multiplexing as a solution, to essentially provide users with concurrent access to the hardware node for experiments which can generate outputs instantaneously. The paper discusses the inefficiency of existing web-based Remote Labs with 4-layered architectures and proposes the use of WebSocket with a 3-layer software architecture to enhance user experience, accelerate input-output communication and implement multi-user multiplexing. To showcase the effectiveness of the proposed architecture over existing implementations using Blynk IoT platform as the middleware, a comprehensive communication pipeline was developed from scratch to perform Kirchhoff's Voltage Law (KVL) experiment remotely.