Overlay network architectures for peer-to-peer Remote Access Laboratories

Remote Access Laboratories are been used for practical learning activities in engineering education in the universities worldwide. Usually these systems follow a centralised client-server paradigm. This work proposes a peer-to-peer remote access laboratory architecture where participants are both users of experiments as well as makers. The feasibility of a peer-to-peer remote laboratories system is investigated. The system is built around a VPN service that allows direct access to makers´ node from user nodes. To simplify the configuration a preconfigured VPN gateway node is introduced. This box is a network router that handles authentication, port forwarding and allocation of address space. The Remote Access Laboratories for fun, innovation and education (RALfie) project is a collaborative research and innovation project with the aim to engage children in STEM topics involving academics from engineering and education disciplines. In the context of RALfie, a prototype system has been developed and trial has been undertaken to establish whether children understand the RAL concept and to test their ability to configure remote experiments on their own. A brief summary trial results for the prototype implementation are reported.