Survey of Remote Laboratories Using Service Oriented Architectures

Remote access to real laboratories can enhance traditional educational paths with practical experiences. However, most of the existing remote laboratories cannot communicate with each other and they are not yet completely integrated with common educational platforms such as Learning Management Systems. These problems could be tackled by offering to end users remote experiments as distributed services using web service technology. The paper examines the architectures of remote laboratories developed by three institutions: DIBE ISILab (Internet Shared Instrumentation Laboratory), HPI DCL (Distributed Control Laboratory) and MIT iLab. Their front-end services are compared and discussed. The paper details how end-user applications interact with these remote labs and reports on the results of a preliminary test of interoperability between remote labs, providing a hint on how different remote experiments can be shared between different institutions.