1758 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 55, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2006However, electric and electronic measurement laboratories II. LMS S(both public and private) are not widespread, due mainly to their A general agreement seems to exist regarding roles playedcosts, and this complicates the life-long learning of specialized by people in a learning environment as well as regarding thetechnicians, especially in the ﬁeld of process control, quality core functionality of modern e-learning platforms –.control, and testing engineering. The main players in these systems are the “learners” and the None of the above-quoted proposals of remote laboratories “authors”; others include trainers and administrators.for electric and electronic measurement teaching includes the Authors (which may be teachers or instructional designers)noticeable support that an LMS could give to learner-centric create content, which is stored under the control of an LMSdidiactic approaches. In particular, concerning the students, it and typically in a database , . Existing content can beis not possible to self-design their own learning process or updated, and it can also be exchanged with other systems. Thecarry out a collaborative or PBL. Concerning teachers, it is LMS is managed by an administrator, and it interacts with anot possible to track the activities of students or carry out an runtime environment that is addressed by learners, who in turninteractive experiment in a virtual classroom. may be coached by a trainer. These three components of the In this paper, a distributed didactic platform based on an e-learning system can be logically and physically distributed,LMS is proposed to provide full courses of electric and elec- i.e., installed on distinct machines in different sites, and pro-tronic measurements including theory as well as practical vided by different vendors or content suppliers . To makeexperiments on real instrumentation. The proposed solution such a distribution feasible, standards such as the Aviation In-integrates the advantages provided by the off-the-shelf LMS, dustry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC)  andwhich is compliant with international standards for Web-based the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) guidelines ,training, and a new approach for providing remote experi- the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) ,ments on measurement instrumentation, based on the thin-client and the Learning Object Metadata (LOM)  speciﬁcationsparadigm. The proposed approach relies on VIs developed try to ensure plug-and-play compatibility and enable interop-in LabVIEW and ensures that the students access the instru- erability, accessibility, and reusability of Web-based learningmentation without downloading heavy plug-ins (software pack- content.ages required for executing the VIs on the client side that E-learning systems may be implemented in such a way thatneed long download, powerful processors, or high memory a customization of features and appearance to a particularcapacity). learner’s need is supported. Learners vary signiﬁcantly in their The work described in this paper has been carried out within prerequisites, abilities, goals for approaching a learning sys-the LADIRE project ﬁnanced by the Italian Ministry of Ed- tem, pace of learning, way of learning, and the time they areucation and University in the National Operating Programme able to spend on learning. Thus, the target group of learners(PON) 2000–2006 . The project aims to realize a national is typically very heterogeneous. A system is ideally able tomeasurement laboratory that will operatively provide the stu- provide and present content for all (or at least several of) thesedents of electric and electronic measurement courses with the groups to be suitable, for example, for a student who wantsaccess to remote measurement laboratories that deliver different to learn about database concepts or for a company employeedidactic activities related to measurement experiments. The who wants to become familiar with company-internal processesinitial infrastructure is composed of the laboratories at the and their execution. To fulﬁll the needs of a ﬂexible system,University of Sannio and at the University of Reggio Calabria a learning platform has to meet a number of requirements,“Mediterranea” under the patronage of the National Research including the integration of a variety of materials, the potentialAssociation on Electric and Electronic Measurement (GMEE) deviation from predetermined sequences of actions, person-and the collaboration of about 20 Italian universities and some alization, and adaptation, and the veriﬁability of work andspecialized instrumentation, e-learning, and publishing compa- accomplishments .nies such as National Instruments, Tektronix, Agilent Technolo- Content consumed by learners and created by authors isgies, Yokogawa, Keithley, Rockwell Automation, Didagroup, commonly handled, stored, and exchanged in units of learningand Augusta Publishing. objects (LOs). Basically, LOs are units of study, exercise, or Moreover, the work carried out until now has led to a second practice that can be consumed in a single session, and theyproject, ﬁnanced by the Italian Space Agency, aiming to design represent reusable granules that can be authored independentlya distance learning system that uses satellite networks as the of the delivery medium and accessed dynamically, e.g., overbackbone, providing Web-based training to mobile as well the Web . Ideally, LOs can be exchanged between differentas home/ofﬁce learners located in all of Europe and North LMSs and plugged together to build classes that are intended toAfrica . serve a particular purpose or goal. This paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the LOs can be stored in a relational or an object-relationalmain functions and the trends in the development of LMSs. database and are typically broken down into a collection ofSection III summarizes the most recent proposals realizing attributes, some of which are mandatory and some of whichremote laboratories for didactic purposes. Section IV describes are optional; a more concrete proposal appears in . In athe overall architecture of the proposed platform and delivered similar way, other information relevant to a learning systemfunctionalities, system architecture, and its hardware and soft- (e.g., learner personal data, learner proﬁles, course maps, LOware components. Section V illustrates the ﬁrst evaluation of sequencing or presentation information, and general user data)the proposed approach on real instruments. can be mapped to common database structures. This does not
RAPUANO AND ZOINO: LMS INCLUDING LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS ON MEASUREMENT INSTRUMENTATION 1759only make interoperability feasible but also allows for a process Collaborative teaching techniques are a typical examplesupport inside an e-learning system that can interact with the of that kind of education strategy. PBL, for example, is aunderlying database appropriately . Indeed, the area of teaching/learning model that involves students in problem-e-learning consists of a multiplicity of complex activities that solving tasks, allows students to actively build and manage theircan be modeled as processes or workﬂows and can be attributed own learning, and results in student-built realistic deliverables.to and associated with the various components of a learning This approach is characterized by the following features: aplatform. project centered curriculum, largely autonomous students, au- By using a workﬂow management system, for example, one thentic tasks, active learning, preponderant role of feedback,can think of a college degree program that is fully supervised and development of generic skills. Projects are used as a teach-by an electronic system . Currently, in Italy, there are some ing/learning method. Students work on concrete, close to real-examples of universities providing college degree programs at world tasks and produce realistic products. The requirementsdistance that have been certiﬁed by the Ministry of Education and the learning outcomes also vary considerably.and University, e.g., the “Guglielmo Marconi” University . Teachers carefully deﬁne the content of the project, its Much research has been focused on e-learning technologies, objectives, assessment, and support, among other things. Theand many topics have been presented covering accessibility, students work in a synchronized way .interoperability, durability, and reusability of components . Another drawback of typical virtual learning environmentsA Web service-oriented framework also gives ﬂexibility to the is the lack of practical experience on actual instrumentation.design of an LMS and hides the implementation complexity As e-learning environments have been originally developed forfrom programmers, thus speeding up the design process. Ap- teaching of computer-science-related topics, their concept ofplying Web service technologies to a SCORM-compatible LMS PBL is related to software projects. Today, LMSs and LCMSssimpliﬁes the implementation and maintenance of the LMS and are widely used to teach every kind of topic; however, theirallows service consumers more choices in ﬁnding the service practical experience on instrumentation is still mainly limitedthey require . A deep review of a wide number of LMSs to simulations.on the market can be found in , where a guide to choosingamong their functionalities is also provided. III. R EMOTE L ABORATORIES From the realization point of view, there are many e-learningproducts that are implemented using different platforms that To understand the measurement procedures and measure-are not compatible with each other. For example, distributed ment system design, it is necessary to repeat the same expe-object systems such as Microsoft COM family and the Common rience of actual measurements of physical phenomena manyObject Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard did times to make all learners able to operate measuring instrumen-not interoperate. Each platform presented numerous security tation –.and administration challenges when deployed over the Internet, Some drawbacks make it difﬁcult to provide a complete setand neither quite met the scalability expectations created by of updated workbenches to every learner. The most relevant arethe Web. Web Services provide a standard means of com- 1) the high cost of measurement equipment and, in general,munication among different software applications running on of experimental laboratories in educational sites and industry;a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. Web services are 2) the growing number of students and specialized technicians;designed as a reference architecture to promote interoperability 3) the reduced number of laboratory technical staff; and 4) theend extensibility among these applications, as well as to allow continuous evolution of involved measurement instrumentation,them to be combined to perform more complex operations. In which makes it difﬁcult and very expensive to keep technicalparticular,  focuses on how to integrate Web services on the staff up-to-date.e-learning application domain. The potentiality of remote teaching for scientiﬁc disciplines One possible drawback of the virtual learning environments, , and in particular the use of the Internet as a channelsuch as those based on LMSs, is that they could be content to reach the students or workers at their homes, was sooncentric. Many instructors simply move all their teaching ma- recognized –. Therefore, currently, a lot of teachingterials to the system. The materials are presented uniformly to material can be found as 1) Web-based lectures and seminarsall learners regardless of their background, learning styles, and that are sometimes interactive, provided by hardware orpreferences. software producers, and mainly directed to professionals that Nowadays, the trend in education strategies goes in the want to reduce the time to market for a new application ;direction of learner-centric learning. Learner-centric learning 2) Web support to university courses, including slides ofplaces the learner at its heart. Learners are expected to ac- lectures and exercises , ; 3) simulation of actualtively engage in the learning process to construct their own experiments to be executed either remotely or on student’s PClearning. Thus, they have more responsibility for their own , ; and, more rarely, 4) remotely accessible laboratories,learning. Instructors are still responsible for learners’ learning, where the learners can access real instrumentation through abut they play the role of a “facilitator,” who guides the learning Web page , , –.process instead of being the sole information provider. Learner- As off-the-shelf LMSs are usually closed proprietary soft-centric learning will give learners a deeper and richer learning ware systems that are often not customizable at all, the researchexperience, as there is greater participation and involvement in carried out by scientists to provide teaching of electric andlearning . electronic measurement including experiments did not take
1760 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 55, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2006into account the possibility of integrating remote laboratoriesand LMSs. The focus of their activity, instead, was the development ofthe remote laboratory itself, eventually adding scheduling anduser account management modules. The theoretical support tothe experiences was provided by traditional classroom lecturesor lecture notes delivered by Web sites from the realizationpoint of view; the solutions found in the literature, except for, require that the software enabling the remote control of theinstrumentation (called virtual instrument or VI) is developedalmost from scratch in C, C++, and Java languages. When astandard communication structure is not used, the reusabilityand the interoperability of a VI are greatly limited to the speciﬁclaboratory application, and the expandability of the systemis bound from the availability of skilled technicians who candevelop new VIs to be included in that system. The project , Fig. 1. Synchronous virtual laboratory/experiment visualization.following the research trend in , , and , reverses theproblem, relying on the use of LabVIEW from National Instru-ments, which is a standard language for VI development for including user authentication and management and tracking ofproducing VIs and the software AppletView from Nacimiento learning process at the user level. Moreover, it provides severalfor producing Java applets that constitute a remote interface innovative functionalities, encapsulating in speciﬁc LOs theof LabVIEW VIs. In such a way, it is possible to reuse the remote control of measurement instrumentation. This objectivewide number of already developed VIs for integrating existing has been achieved by developing an additive module for theinstrumentation in a remote laboratory without developing new LMS Inform@ from Didagroup . The module ensures thesoftware. Java applet ensures the compatibility of the laboratory integration of VIs written in LabVIEW in the LMS as LOs towith every operating system and does not oblige the student enable remote users to get control of a measurement instrumentto download heavy plug-ins from the Internet. Moreover, most transparently and to display the measurement results within theof the solutions found in the literature require the development normal learning activities. Therefore, the students’ activities areof the accessory software applications enabling the sharing of tracked at the LO level.the laboratory instrumentation, such as scheduling and security The remote laboratory is distributed on a geographical scalepolicy. The main limit of the new solution is the impossibility since the measurement instruments are located physically inof developing learners’ own VI. laboratories belonging to different universities. At the moment, Following the same approach found in the LMS-oriented two laboratories are involved: One is located at the Universityresearch, in the last few years, a new trend started for ensuring of Sannio in Benevento, and the other is located at the “Mediter-the VI interoperability and reusability using eXtensible Markup ranea” University of Reggio Calabria. The access requestsLanguage (XML) and Simple Object Addressable Protocol to the measurement instruments are handled by a scheduling(SOAP). The VIs are realized and could be accessed as Web system that connects, through speciﬁc policies, the user to aservices , . The main advantage of these solutions is speciﬁc physical laboratory in which the required measurementthat they can be easily integrated in LOs for existing LMSs. instruments are available.However, in these cases, the language used to develop the VIs Different users’ proﬁles are managed by the system: “stu-is C++ or J2EE; thus, the existing LabVIEW VIs cannot be dent,” “teacher,” and “administrator.”reused. The main services delivered by the remote measurement laboratory module to the student are the following: IV. I NTEGRATING THE L ABORATORY AND THE LMS 1) Synchronous Virtual Laboratory: This service allows the student to follow online a laboratory activity held by This paper proposes a new distance learning environment the teacher of the course. The student obtains the dis-to teach electric and electronic measurement that integrates an play on his/her computer of the server desktop usedoff-the-shelf LMS and a geographically distributed laboratory. by the teacher to control the measurement instrumentsThe next sections describe the main services provided, focusing involved in the experiment. The experiment is carriedon the distributed laboratory accessed through the LMS. In out on the front panel of a LabVIEW VI, controllingparticular, it will describe the distributed system, its architec- all the involved instrumentation. In Fig. 1, the controlture and innovative functions, as well as its integration with panel of a VXI oscilloscope is connected to the Mea-the LMS. surement Server (MS) by means of an MXI-2 inter- face card. 2) Experiment Visualization: This service allows the studentA. Delivered Services to observe the automatic execution of an experiment The developed distance learning environment delivers the and to acquire an accurate knowledge concerning thetypical functionalities of a common LMS described above, operations and the possible results (see Fig. 1).
RAPUANO AND ZOINO: LMS INCLUDING LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS ON MEASUREMENT INSTRUMENTATION 1761 test, and the VI has only to be copied in a speciﬁc directory in the PC used as a control unit called MS. Also, if the hardware setup has to be carried out in the laboratory, the VI can be produced in the teacher’s workplace and then transferred to the MS by means of the above-quoted services. Finally, the administrator is responsible for the correct oper- ation of the overall distributed system and for handling the user proﬁles. B. Architecture of the Distributed Laboratory To allow a student to access a remote and geographically distributed didactic laboratory, this paper proposes a Web-based multitier distributed architecture centered on the LMS that can be considered as the core component of the overall system. The module designed to manage the remote laboratory is based on a scheduling system that manages the catalog ofFig. 2. Experiment control. available measurement instrumentation and redirects the user request to the measurement laboratory, which is chosen among the partner laboratories, in which is the required instrument is currently available. Moreover, it enables the requestor to gain control of a measurement instrument by the LabVIEW software environment without requiring that it be installed on the client side (Figs. 4 and 5). The proposed multitier architecture is composed of three tiers. 1) “The presentation tier” manages the Experiment Visual- ization on the client side. It is based on standard Web browsers, with no need for speciﬁc software compo- nents (no speciﬁc operating system is required). The only software component needed is the Java 2 Runtime Environment, which is used to employ the Java Applet technology for experiment access and control from the client machine. 2) “The middle tier” manages the system logic on the serverFig. 3. Experiment creation. side. It includes the following components. a) The LMS is executed on a central server of the overall 3) Experiment Control: This service allows the student to e-learning environment, called “Laboratory Portal.” perform an experiment controlling remotely one or more The LMS interfaces to the users through a Web Server instruments and observing them by means of a camera. that is hosted on the same machine. The student can choose a speciﬁc experiment in a set b) A Laboratory Server (LS) is used to interface a lab- of predeﬁned ones, and he can run it only if the re- oratory with the rest of the distributed architecture. quired measurement instruments are currently available There is an LS for each measurement laboratory of the (see Fig. 2). universities involved in the project. It delivers access 4) Experiment Creation: This service allows the student to and control to the measurement equipment through a create remotely an experiment interacting directly with service called “Bridge Service.” Moreover, the LS is specialized software executed on the servers used to con- the only machine in a laboratory directly accessible trol the measurement instruments. This feature enables from the Internet, while the other servers are con- the adoption of PBL as a didactic model. Under the super- nected in a private local network. For this reason, the vision of the teacher, the students can develop a speciﬁc LS can also be used for security purposes to monitor project producing, in an individual or collaborative man- access to the measurement laboratory and to protect it ner, a VI to control a set of real instruments (see Fig. 3). against malicious accesses. The services delivered to a teacher are related to the remote c) An MS is a PC enabling the interaction with one orhandling of the available experiments: remote creation, updat- more instruments. The MS is physically connected toing, and removal of experiments. Currently, the experiments are a set of different programmable instruments throughcreated as VIs realized by the teacher or the tutor. The setup of an interface card. Currently, the General-Purposean experiment is the same as if it is carried out locally. The Interface Bus (GPIB) interface is used for all the MSs,instruments should be connected to the circuit or device under while one of them also includes an MXI-2 interface
1762 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 55, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2006Fig. 4. Hardware components of the proposed architecture. C. Remote Access to the VIs One of the most relevant problems in designing the labora- tory subsystem is remote access to the experiment. The main design objectives taken into account to provide the remote access to the VIs were the following. 1) Portability: The visualization environment has to be portable on different hardware platforms and operating systems. 2) Usability and accessibility: The visualization and man- agement of an experiment have to be easy to understand and to perform, even for users that are not expert infor- mation technologists, and the system features have to be accessed easily and homogeneously by students operating at university laboratories or at home.Fig. 5. Software layers of the components of the laboratory architecture. 3) Maintenance: The maintenance costs should be re- for connecting VXI instrumentation. The connection duced to the minimum. This can be made through a with the circuit or the device under test is assured client–server approach that eliminates the need for in- by the instruments or by means of a data acquisition stalling and upgrading application code and data on client (DAQ) board (see Fig. 4). The used VIs are stored in a computers. database of the MS, where the LabVIEW environment 4) Client-side common technologies: Students have access is installed. No adjustment is necessary to include a to the system using their desktop computers based on VI in the virtual learning environment; therefore, the common hardware and software technologies, with no wide number of existing VIs can be reused without need for powerful processors or high memory capacity, requiring additive work. and connecting to the Internet through low-speed dial-up 3) “The storage tier” performs the data management related, connections. for example, to the user proﬁles and the distributed 5) Security: The remote access of the students through the management of the data related to the available experi- Internet must preserve the integrity of recorded and trans- ments at different measurement laboratories. It is based mitted data and of the system as a whole. on a series of geographically distributed databases, man- 6) Scalability: System performance must not degrade with aged using the Relational Database Management System the growing number of connected users. (RDBMS). To achieve these objectives, the thin-client model, instead To overcome the well-known security weakness of of the classic client–server one, has been chosen. The studentMicrosoft-based networks, each laboratory is protected by a obtains on his/her computer the display of the applicationLinux-based gateway machine that operates ﬁrewalling and executed on the MS and used to control the instrumentationNetwork Address Translation (NAT). for the requested experiment. Moreover, it has been chosen to
RAPUANO AND ZOINO: LMS INCLUDING LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS ON MEASUREMENT INSTRUMENTATION 1763use the Web and Java technologies. These technologies, in fact,can be opportunely used to allow a student, using exclusivelya common Web browser with a Java Virtual Machine, theremote visualization and control of an experiment, ensuringhigh system portability and usability and the fulﬁllment of theother objectives described above. A “thin-client model” is based on a distributed computingparadigm in which the network separates the presentation ofthe user interface from the application logic. It is a client–serverarchitecture in which the application execution and data man-agement is performed on the server, called “Terminal Server.”The user interacts with a lightweight client, called “PresentationClient,” that is generally responsible only for handling user in-put and output, such as sending user input back to the server and Fig. 6. Remote visualization interactions.receiving screen display updates over a network connection.As a result, the client generally does not need many resourcesand can have a simple conﬁguration, reducing support andmaintenance costs. By using thin-client technologies, students It is worth noting that in the Experiment Creation phase,are also able to use limited hardware devices: the so-called once a project has been assigned to a student, the involved“thin-client devices”  equipped only with a processor and instrumentation is already known. The main difference betweena Flash memory (no hard disk or other storage units) such as the Experiment Control and the Experiment Creation is thatpersonal data assistant (PDAs), handheld devices, and mobile the student only has access to a VI front panel or to the wholephones. This solution extends the class of possible learners to LabVIEW development environment on the MS.mobile users, owning a smart phone, a PDA, or a notebook with To allow a client to access the system without the need ofa modem or a wireless LAN adapter. preinstalled software, a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client The thin-client paradigm allows the platform to visualize and has been used, allowing the MS desktop to be visualized on thecontrol a remote device through the interaction ﬂow among the client side using a standard Web browser. In particular, on thedistributed system components described in the following. client side, the Terminal Server Advanced Client (TSAC) re- 1) The student executes the authentication phase on the LMS leased by Microsoft, which is a Win32-based ActiveX control, using a login and a password, interacting with the Web can be used to run Terminal Services sessions within Microsoft Server used by the LMS. Internet Explorer. 2) The student chooses a service (i.e., Synchronous Virtual However, the fulﬁllment of the main goals of the experimen- Laboratory, Experiment Visualization, Experiment Con- tal section of the LMS for measurement teaching required the trol, or Experiment Creation). design and implementation of a speciﬁc client compliant with 3) The student visualizes on his/her desktop the VI front Microsoft RDP. A speciﬁc important goal is that the student, af- panel on the MS to which he/she is connected. ter the authentication phase on the LMS platform, has to obtain If the chosen service is the Synchronous Virtual Laboratory the remote visualization and control of the required experiment executed in the LabVIEW environment on the appropriate MS 1) the student is connected to the LS where the teacher is through the Bridge Service component of the respective LS performing the experiment; (see Fig. 6). Moreover, to avoid malicious attacks on the system, 2) the Bridge Service of the LS ﬁnds the MS that is currently the student has to obtain the remote visualization of the VI front used by the teacher and allows the student to connect to panel without the privilege of a full user account on the MS, the related Terminal Server to visualize the experiment on which is, instead, necessary to exploit the functionalities of the his/her own computer. Terminal Server executed on that machine. If the chosen service is the Experiment Visualization, Exper- This result has been achieved through the insertion, made byiment Control, or Experiment Creation means of the Bridge Service component, of a valid username 1) the student chooses an experiment among a list of avail- and password in the connection request made by the RDP able ones; client. 2) on the basis of the required experiment, the student is Because of the legacy nature of the TSAC, it is not suited connected to an LS of a partner university, which is to modify at runtime the RDP connection request to insert the equipped with the required measurement instrumentation valid username and password. A speciﬁc RDP client that uses available for the deployment of the experiment, chosen the Java Applet technology has been developed for this reason. by the scheduling system of the LMS; In this way, it is possible to exploit all the advantages of the 3) the Bridge Service of the LS ﬁnds the MS that is Java language that are particularly suitable for programming connected to the required measurement instruments and in distributed and heterogeneous computing environments. In allows the student to connect themselves to the related particular, its direct support to many programming aspects Terminal Server to visualize, manage, or develop a new such as multithreading, code mobility, and security has been VI from his/her own computer. considered very useful.
1764 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 55, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2006 Italian Association of Electric and Electronic Measurement Researchers (AGMEE) is providing the didactic contents as well as several measurement experiments. Some others are currently being developed at the LESIM. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach for the remote control of the instrumentation, its capability of providing access to the remote laboratories by means of a common 56-kb/s dial-up connection has been asserted. There- fore, the RDP clients based on ActiveX and Java Applet tech- nology have been used, measuring the bandwidth occupation of the client–server interactions during the remote execution of an experiment. Because thin-client platforms are designed and used very differently from traditional desktop systems, quantifying and measuring their performance effectively is a very difﬁcult task . Many determining factors, in fact, can inﬂuence a performance comparison. Some of these are the use of optional mechanisms of the thin-client protocol (such as persistent caching and compression for the RDPFig. 7. Web portal realized to enable the authoring of didactic content fromother universities. protocol), the application executed on the server, the network bandwidth, and the kind of trafﬁc that shares the bandwidth segment, etc. To carry out the performance evaluations for the project, a The applet permits the connection and the automatic authen- reference experiment has been used, i.e., the Spectrum Mea-tication on the Terminal Server of the chosen MS. Some of surement VI provided as a LabVIEW example from Nationalthe features of the developed RDP client, called Laboratory Instruments. It does not control any instrument; thus, theApplet, are bandwidth measurement is independent from the programmer’s efﬁciency and from the GIPB communication latencies. — “compression” of transmitted data to minimize the The server conﬁguration on which the Terminal Server is network trafﬁc; executed is one of the MSs already set up in the labora- — choice of the “cache dimension” on the client side tory in Benevento; its characteristics are CPU Pentium IV at (not available for TSAC client that limits the cache 2.80 GHz, 512 MB of RAM, and a Windows 2003 server. dimension to 10 MB); Its network bandwidth toward the Internet is currently about — choice of “load-balancing” option: the possibility to 768 kb/s. The client was located at the site of Didagroup in San use a load-balancing solution for Terminal Server based Giorgio del Sannio: a town near Benevento. The conﬁguration on server farms so that the client can be connected to of the client is a CPU Pentium IV at 2.0 GHz, 256 MB of the least loaded available server, in terms of bandwidth RAM, and Windows XP Professional. Its bandwidth toward the occupation, number of opened sessions, CPU load, and Internet is 56 kb/s. memory occupation. Using the ActiveX-based client during the time interval in which the user performs some operations on the VI, the bandwidth is nearly entirely occupied. Outside these time V. F IRST R ESULTS intervals, due to the use of the compression and persistent The proposed learning environment, called LADIRE , caching mechanisms of the RDP protocol, the bandwidth oc-has been realized in its software components and is cur- cupation decreases up to about 5.6 kb/s. Using the developedrently being deployed at the Laboratory of Signal Processing Java RDP client, a similar performance has been achieved.and Measurement Information (LESIM), University of Sannio This is made possible mainly by using the same persistent. Referring to the architecture described in Section IV-B, caching mechanism of the RDP and by opportunely changingLADIRE has been realized with one LS, one ﬁrewall/NAT, ten the cache dimension on the client side. In particular, duringMSs, and 40 measurement instruments going from simple Agi- the time intervals in which the user performs some actionslent 6.5 digit multimeters to the most up-to date Tektronix TDS on the VI, the bandwidth occupation is included between 32 and7704 oscilloscope and LeCroy SDA 6000 serial data analyzer, 56 kb/s. The other time, the bandwidth occupation decreasesincluding spectrum analyzers, impedance meters, power me- to about 5.2 kb/s. Relying on such bandwidth occupation,ters, signal generators, and power supplies. The enhanced LMS the hardware requirements on the client side are limited to ahas also been installed on a Dell PowerEdge server, located in 56-kb/s modem. On the laboratory side, 768 kb/s is enough tothe same LESIM, and a Web portal  (see Fig. 7) has been manage ten different experiments that are contemporarily activerealized to enable the authoring of didactic contents from other in the Experiment Control or Experiment Creation modes. Asuniversities. the LMS already supports multicast communication, the labo- The collaboration of electric and electronic measurement ratory bandwidth is not a problem in the Experiment Visual-professors coming from about 20 Italian universities and the ization mode.
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1766 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 55, NO. 5, OCTOBER 2006 Sergio Rapuano (M’00) received the Master’s Francesco Zoino was born in Benevento, Italy, on degree in electronic engineering (cum laude) and the August 8, 1976. He received the Master’s degree in Ph.D. degree in computer science, telecommunica- software engineering from the University of Sannio, tions and applied electromagnetism from the Uni- Benevento, in 2004 with his thesis entitled “A new versity of Salerno, Salerno, Italy, in 1999 and 2003, method for the detection of harmonics in the power respectively. quality.” He is currently working toward the Ph.D. In 1999, he joined the research activities carried degree in software engineering at the Laboratory out at the Laboratory of Signal Processing and Mea- of Signal Processing and Measurement Information surement Information, University of Sannio, Ben- (LESIM), University of Sannio. evento, Italy. In 2002, he joined the Faculty of He is currently with the LESIM, University of Engineering, University of Sannio, as an Assistant Sannio. His current research interest includes remoteProfessor of electric and electronic measurement. He is currently developing control of measurement instrumentation over the Internet.his research work in digital processing for measurement in telecommunications,data converters, distributed measurement systems and virtual laboratories, andmedical measurement. Prof. Rapuano is a member of the IEEE Instrumentation and MeasurementSociety TC-10 and the Secretary of the TC-23 Working Group on “e-tools forEducation in Instrumentation and Measurement.”