Using cloud web services to intermediate communication in ISA / ELSA: Circumventing the firewall in single user and collaborative remote experimentation

Abstract

Remote experimentation has long conflicted with security policies imposed by networks administrators. To provide external access to experiment servers in a university, security measures are demanded. Such leads to an excessive dependency on the IT departments for services configuration and maintenance. In the present work, modifications in ISA/ELSA architecture are proposed to circumvent those problems. By locating proxies in the cloud, the communication between user interface and laboratory experiment avoids the need for a laboratory server, which now acts like a polling client of the cloud web service. Configurations for single-user and cooperative remote experiments are discussed. In tests, requests processing time was less than 250ms, enough to support a great amount of remote experiments.