Uma infraestrutura para laboratórios de acesso remoto federados com suporte à virtualização

Abstract

The Internet is nowadays an important environment for collaboration and learning. The remote access laboratories (or WebLabs) are an example of such technology for this reality. WebLabs can provide access to real devices through a network, usually the Internet, and allow the devices to be accessed and controlled remotely. This experimentation model, however, preclude the remote execution of certain types of experiments, for example, those sensitive to communication delays. This work presents a proposal for an infrastructure for federated WebLabs capable of supporting experiments with stringent network requirements such as high communication rate and low delay and jitter. The proposed infrastructure uses open standards and technologies in different system components, such as federated authentication and policy based authorization. The infrastructure also employs virtualization to run experiments with strict network requirements safely on servers maintained by WebLab and connected to the same subnet connecting the resources. As a contribution, we developed an application programming interface (API) that integrates and abstracts the particularities of adopted technologies and provides methods for policy creation, experiments execution, and control of virtual machines. To validate the proposal, we evaluate an experiment in the mobile robotics area and compare its performance when executed in several network scenarios, including the virtualization scenario offered by the proposed infrastructure.