LATERE: A Remote-Access Laboratory For Experiences On Management And Control Of Networking Devices

Abstract

A networking laboratory contains expensive equipment and offers a small grade of scalability. Remote laboratories allow for much more efficient use of laboratory equipment, and give users the opportunity to batch-schedule their experiments and manage them from the comfort of their local clients. In this paper, LATERE, a new interactive laboratory which allows remote testing of complex satellite scenarios and wireless indoor networks on real equipment, is detailed. Users can select arbitrary network topologies; characteristics of each link and transport layers, used by the traffic generators, can be freely set. Moreover, LATERE offers a user-friendly web interface to define each experiment parameters and to asynchronously view all results, which are displayed and also emailed to the students; an experiments’ database is kept, allowing per-user profiles and history, plus logging and test reproducibility. LATERE is scalable, and built upon a lightweight middleware distributed and embedded on the interface with the equipment. LATERE is based on standard inexpensive hardware running open source software.