The WiLAB Telemeasurement Platform For Distributed Resources On Heterogeneous Communication Networks

Abstract

This chapter presents a platform enabling the concept of cooperative telemeasurements involving distributed resources, such as laboratories with instrumentation, programmable devices based on FPGA (partially or fully programmable) or DSP architectures and network cameras. The platform allows an easy and fast remote configuration through virtual interfaces (VIs), implemented through both commercial software and Java; in the latter case VIs are designed in such a way that they do not depend on the particular resource, but on its functionalities. That means, for example, that the interface working for a specific spectrum analyzer also adapts itself to the same kind of instruments of different manufactures, whereas the traditional approach would require customized VIs for each specific instrument. New general-purpose data structures and communication protocols have been properly implemented in XML code, with high degree of scalability and transparency to user hardware and interface. The architecture has been implemented in the Wireless Communication Laboratories (WiLab) at the University of Bologna, Italy, where three different laboratories are interconnected through a heterogeneous communication network and properly cooperate to increase their functionalities.