Delivering Collaborative Web Labs as a Service for Engineering Education

Abstract

Abstract-As Internet speed grows up and academic networks reach more users, engineering schools take interest in online laboratories as a mean to increase the spectrum of offered services and to reduce costs by sharing expensive lab equipments. In this perspective, online labs must comply both with the scientific and pedagogic requirements coming from the lab users (students, researchers, …) and with the requirements coming from the administrative and technical staff in charge to manage and deliver the lab services. In this paper we describe a system architecture based on both the classes of requirements and discuss the main results achieved implementing a prototype of the proposed architecture in a real academic scenario.

Providing collaborative support to virtual and remote laboratories

“…To promote software reuse, some authors propose general and reusable frameworks that add collaborative support to VRLs. For instance, Xing and Yao [39] describe an architecture for remote collaborative experiments based on the serviceoriented architecture (SOA), Gravier et al [21] provide a library based on Semantic Web technologies, and Bochicchio and Longo [40] propose a prototype system called Collaborative Lab as a Service (CLaaS), which manages collaborative web labs adopting the software as a service (SaaS) paradigm.…”

NSensor – Wireless Sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring

“…Wireless sensor networks are used in various fields, such as environmental monitoring [1,2], health [3,4], sports [5,6], surveillance [7], acoustics [8], industrial equipment monitoring [9,10] and in engineering education [11]. A WSN usually involves three main components: sensor nodes, gateways and a main server.…”