An auto-routing multi-server architecture for high-education training on instrumentation and measurement

This paper describes a set-up that can be employed for high-education training on instrumentation and data acquisition systems. The proposed solution allows many users to simultaneously access groups of real instruments to program them and to gather the measurement results. The multi-user, multi-instruments sessions are obtained by means of a queuing process with instrument locking capability. The architecture is based on a domain of instrument servers which is capable of automatically route the requests of any client toward the faster available server that is capable of satisfying the client request. Client applications can be easily developed by using conventional high-level programming languages, well-assessed virtual instrumentation frameworks or by using a standard Internet browser as front end.