Performance and Quality of Experience of Remote Access Laboratories

Remote Access Laboratories have become important learning and teaching tools. This research presents a performance study that targets a specific remote-access architecture in a university environment. The system provides authenticated and mediated global remote access to virtual machines as well as hardware systems, which drive physical experiments. This paper presents system performance results that have been obtained with a set of automated and user-based tests. Key aims of the study were: To gain a better understanding of traffic that is caused by experiment usage; to get an indication of expected user performance; and to develop a measure to predict Quality of Experience, based on easily measurable Quality of Service parameters. The study emulates access bandwidth, round trip times of typical usage scenarios and provides results that allow classifying expected user performance. It demonstrates that failure rate is excellent measure of usability. Thin-client and remote desktop architectures are popular to separate the location of users and the actual data processing and use similar structures. Results of this study can be applied to these applications as well.

[1]  S. Hemminger.  Network Emulation with NetEm , 2022 .

[2]  METHODS FOR SUBJECTIVE DETERMINATION OF TRANSMISSION QUALITY Summary , 2022 .

[3]  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,et al.  Interest and the quality of experience in classrooms , 1994 .

[4]  Markus Fiedler,et al.  A generic quantitative relationship between quality of experience and quality of service , 2010, IEEE Network.

[5]  Richard E. Mayer,et al.  Multimedia Learning: The Promise of Multimedia Learning , 2001 .

[6]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Quantifying interactive user experience on thin clients , 2006, Computer.

[7]  Peter Gibbings,et al.  Inception and Management of Remote Access Laboratory Projects , 2010 .

[8]  Alexander A. Kist,et al.  Quality of experience of online learning tools , 2011 .

[9]  Alexander A. Kist,et al.  Work in progress — Performance evaluation of online learning tools , 2011, 2011 Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE).

[10]  Sabine Möbs.  A learner, is a learner, is a user, is a customer: QoS-based experience-aware adaptation , 2008, ACM Multimedia.

[11]  Jason Nieh,et al.  On the performance of wide-area thin-client computing , 2006, TOCS.

[12]  Carmen Guerrero,et al.  Fair Quality of Experience (QoE) Measurements Related with Networking Technologies , 2010, WWIC.

[13]  Peter Brooks,et al.  User measures of quality of experience: why being objective and quantitative is important , 2010, IEEE Network.

[14]  Fernando A. Kuipers,et al.  Techniques for Measuring Quality of Experience , 2010, WWIC.

[15]  Klara Nahrstedt,et al.  Quality of experience in distributed interactive multimedia environments: toward a theoretical framework , 2009, ACM Multimedia.

[16]  A. Binzenhofer,et al.  Performance comparison of windows-based thin-client architectures , 2007, 2007 Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference.

[17]  Jennifer E. Rowley,et al.  e-Learning: The student experience , 2007, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[18]  Carol S. Weinstein,et al.  Effective Teaching Strategies: Lessons from Research and Practice , 2003 .

[19]  Andy Hopper,et al.  Virtual Network Computing , 1998, IEEE Internet Comput..

[20]  Education Queensland,et al.  Productive Pedagogies: Classroom Reflection Manual , 2002 .

[21]  Jason Nieh,et al.  Measuring thin-client performance using slow-motion benchmarking , 2001, TOCS.

[22]  Peter Reichl,et al.  Economics of logarithmic Quality-of-Experience in communication networks , 2010, 2010 9th Conference of Telecommunication, Media and Internet.

[23]  Alexander A. Kist.  A framework to evaluate performance from an application and user perspective , 2011, 2011 Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ATNAC).

[24]  Sally Sambrook,et al.  Factors influencing learners’ perceptions of the quality of computer based learning materials , 2001 .