Hamadou Saliah-Hassane

Laboratory as a Service (LaaS): A model for developing and implementing remote laboratories as modular components

This contribution introduces a novel model, Laboratory as a Service (LaaS), for developing remote laboratories as independent component modules and implementing them as a set of loosely-coupled services to be consumed with a high level of abstraction and virtualization. LaaS aims to tackle the common concurrent challenges in remote laboratories developing and implementation such as inter-institutional sharing, interoperability with other heterogeneous systems, coupling with heterogeneous services and learning objects, difficulty of developing, and standardization.

RVLabX, a Web-based interactive laboratory environment for education and research

RVLabX stands for eXtended Remote Virtual Laboratory. It is a workplace software, that permits the creation and management of a Web-based generic, interactive laboratory with a particular emphasis on the creation of XML-based adaptable user interface for each team member involved in the process. The software can be installed on any desktop and connects to distributed virtual laboratory servers. The ultimate goal is to create and configure distributed laboratories, where users can interact with one another as if all are working both in cooperation and collaboratively on a single site. Thus, students, teachers, tutors, laboratory technicians or managers at geographically distinct locations can share their expertise and equipment.

Dynamic publishing and availability management of virtual machines in Virtual Organization

Nowadays, universities and research institutes are more and more feeling the need to establish collaboration networks for sharing skills, as well as material, human, software and virtualized resources. This refers to the idea of Virtual Organizations (VOs) which allow any user of a member organization to access technological and pedagogical resources available in another partner organization. However, this collaboration, most of the time, raises some concern for member organizations. Indeed, they are afraid not to be able to use their own resources when they need to. Information on resources availability is generally static, provided at a given moment. The presence management of virtual machines with the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) protocol presents limitations in the context of a collaborative network. So, the constraints identified in terms of resource sharing, instant availability and restrictions are the main obstacles to setting up such a virtual organization. This paper aims to propose and implement an application that manages dynamic discovery and availability of shared virtual machines. The proposed system manages in real time the presence of a resource and its availability in terms of its occupation or use. The system will also allow a member organization to make its resources available and enjoy priority on its resources in case it needs to use them.

Mobile open online laboratories: A way towards connectionist massive online laboratories with x-API (c-MOOLs)

In this paper, we will present and compare the typology of online labs now accepted in the various standardization of online laboratory components working groups and show how they evolved over time and become indispensable tools for teaching, training and learning in science, engineering and technology. We will demonstrate why, among all other described below, mobile laboratories constitute today the most appropriate to implement Massive Open Online Laboratories (MOOLs) or Mobile Open Online Laboratories (MOOLs) using a lab@home or portable laboratory concepts thanks to miniaturized open source electronic devices and cloud computing technologies. As member of research community networked distributed systems, we know that online labs, an instance of it, or commonly called labs at distance are distributed and flexible IT environments that enable a learner to perform laboratory work over computer networks, alone or in collaboration with other participants in a distance learning context. Participants are actors playing each one a role during an interactive session in synchronous or asynchronous mode through computer user interfaces. The online labs allow the sharing of material resources and expertise. They combine the advantages of different types of laboratories.

Lab@home for analog electronic circuit laboratory

Laboratory activities of analog electronic circuit undergraduate course at École de technologie supérieure (ETS) require the physical presence of students in groups of 2 in the laboratory to complete predefined or project based laboratories. This classical or traditional approach continuously requires big investments on laboratory equipment and significant space requirements. Moreover, it obliges students to be physically present in the laboratory to complete their experiments. The lab instructor is also present to help them with their needs or to answer their specific questions related to the experiments. With the evolution of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and electronic circuit board technologies, further possibilities even include to bring the laboratory at home (Lab@home). This philosophy can be achieved with the advantages of miniaturized and low cost equipment and facilities, complemented with the students already available personal computers. Available miniature kits include basic electronics for the generation and processing of various types of signals. The personal computer coupled with the kit, acts as a set of signal injecting and measuring devices. Pedagogical strategies to encourage team collaborative work, ensuring simultaneous information exchanges between the students themselves and with the laboratory instructor can be elaborated specifically for this innovative setup. This recent approach can be used to help enforce the knowledge and competence of the students, allowing them to develop their autonomy, their creativity and thus develop their ability to innovate. This paper presents and further details the Lab@home approach, with its impacts on the students, the Professor, the lab instructor and on the academic institution more globally. The necessary resources, common challenges and difficulties, advantages and drawbacks of the approach, and recommendations for its implementation are also included. A Lab@home implementation case study is also presented at the end of this paper.

The experience of a collaborative project on remote laboratory: From development to operation

Distance Learning has seen in the last twenty years a remarkable growth through ICT developments. This evolution has rarely involved training based laboratory work. The concept of Online laboratory or Lab At Distance (LAD) has timidly accompanied this trend. Today, with the development of digital equipment and the increased performances of Internet communication, the LAD found an interesting tool in training systems.

Standardization Layers for Remote Laboratories as Services and Open Educational Resources

Delivering education and educational resources has evolved from class-centered settings towards distributed, cloud-based models. This is mainly the consequence of publicly available educational resources such as documents, videos, and web applications. At the same time, emerging technologies in information and communication are enabling the development and deployment of remote laboratories on the Web. Today, these freely and openly available educational interactive media are known as Open Education Resources (OERs). Learning management systems, MOOC platforms, and educational social media platforms provide a medium for teachers to create their teaching activities around OERs in a structured way. To enjoy an effective and productive learning experience, it is necessary for the educational resources to be fully integrated in the hosting platform. While most platforms have a ready-to-embed infrastructure for certain types of OERs, they are not ready to host remote laboratories in an integrated fashion. In this paper, we define the necessary integration layers for remote labs in online learning environments. The work is validated by two implementations with different target platforms.

Improving security and mobility for remote access: A wireless sensor network case

Ubiquitous Computing is a new Internet revolution that will allow, among other uninterrupted access to the network actors machines and some mobile devices. In this paper, the example of mobile laboratory is composed a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) whose the data collection is done through a special node called master. HIP (Host Identity Protocol) is used as communication protocol. The HIP architecture uses the identity/locator split. In the proposed architecture, mobility is managed by three entities including mobile node (master), locator manager or fLRVS (firewall and Local Rendezvous Server), access link manager or S-RVS (Subnet Rendezvous Server). The new introduced network entity is fLRVS, it is responsible for the node accessibility in the domain and filtering based on the HI (Host Identifier). The node identifier named HI, is the public key of an asymmetric key-pair. The HIP Registration and HIP Rendezvous Extension have been modified to achieve this authentication system. A proposed mobility scheme, named HIPdisass, is based on a proactive handover mechanism which reduce latency and packet loss. At outside, remote hosts can connect to the mobile laboratory safely regardless of the type of access network.

Persistent SCTP timeout policy by using cross-layer mechanism

To meet various contingencies of operating wireless networks including for example the change of the state of the channel, cross-layer techniques facilitate the sharing of information between the OSI model layers and can be apply to all various protocols levels, if there are interactions for which the overall performance of the studied system can be improved. Reliable transport protocols use the retransmission timeout management mechanism (RTO-MM) when a bad state of the wireless channel occurs, which temporarily blocks the transmission of data. In this paper, we suggest a new policy of timeout applied to the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) called persistent timeout policy. This policy is based on the use of the channel status provided by the 802.11 link layer, through the cross-layer mechanism. The principle of this timeout is that when a bad state of the wireless channel blocks the sending of data, SCTP continuously observes the evolution of this state to detect the next favorable change before sending its segments. We evaluate the following two timeout policies (persistent and traditional RTO-MM) of SCTP in an ad hoc network, and also in comparison with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Section I of this paper presents an overview of the SCTP protocol. Section II presents the principle of the persistent timeout policy. Section III presents the simulation results that are used to compare the two timeout policies of the two reliable transport protocols SCTP and TCP.

Enhanced HIP-based micro-mobility and macro-mobility management by proactive signaling scheme

In current HIP (Host Identity Protocol) architecture, the mobility procedure consist of a three-way handshake between the mobile node (MN) and its peers. This procedure lead to a stopping communication between MN and its correspondents nodes (CN), which results in packets loss and delay if the procedure takes some time. HIP is not optimized for micro-mobility. In the literature, several solutions have been proposed, but each requires a signaling procedure during handover. In this paper, the proposed scheme does not require any signaling at the micro-mobility and reduces signaling overhead during macro-mobility. Indeed our mobility scheme is looked ahead-based, thus the mobile node is able to know his prospective network prefix before link on associated future point of attachment. Three signaling types have been introduced and mobility information exchange is before Handover. The performance evaluation is based on an analytical model and tests are in a real environment. OpenHIP is implemented for testing performance of the proposed mobility scheme, unlike other schemes are content to do their tests in a simulated environment.