The iLab service broker : a software infrastructure providing common services in support of Internet accessible laboratories

Abstract

Remote laboratories that are accessible via the Internet are becoming a common phenomenon in higher education institutions. This thesis describes the iLab Service Broker architecture, a software infrastructure that supports these Internet-accessible labs by providing a number of services that facilitates their administration and management. These common services are authentication, authorization, lab administration, scheduling and data storage. While Internet- accessible laboratories may be quite varied in terms of the technologies they use, they tend to have similar topologies, consisting of a lab client, lab server and database. The end-user interacts with the lab client to issue commands to, and view results from the lab server, and the database stores data from the lab server. The Service Broker's internal architecture constitutes the business logic rules that govern how the common services are administered. Its external architecture exposes these services, using web services, and makes them available to the remote laboratories in a platform-independent manner. The Service Broker attempts to cater for the different experiment models that Internet-accessible labs host. These models are the batched experiment, the interactive experiment and the sensor lab experiment.