LABNET: towards remote laboratories with unified access

Although access to remote laboratory equipment through a networking infrastructure is becoming an actively investigated and experimented topic, most current implementations are dedicated to specific application environments. Nonetheless, essentially the same basic structure, in terms of protocol and software architecture, can be used to face a great deal of heterogeneous experimental settings. The variability in the resources available to users, both in terminal and access network capabilities, requires a high degree of flexibility, abstraction, application independence, and ease of configuration in the user’s access devices. A further aspect regards the possible need of distributing the experiment’s results to a large user population, which calls for the adoption of multicasting. This paper reports the architecture developed and the results achieved within the three-year term LABNET project, which has addressed these issues within an integrated laboratory environment, aimed at providing unified access to heterogeneous equipment for a multiplicity of users with potentially different capabilities and skills.