An Information Technology Infrastructure for Internet-Enabled Remote and Portable Laboratories

With the proliferation of distributed and distance learning in higher education, there is a growing need for remote and portable laboratory design and deployment for the engineering, science, and technology education sectors. Amongst the current threads of research in this area, very little work has focused on solutions to the challenges, which are imposed by modern day information technology infrastructure, enterprise networks, and enterprise network security change management processes, that will be faced by large scale deployments of remote and portable labs. In this paper, the authors will discuss some of these challenges and will propose the use of the command and control communications architecture coupled with Web 2.0 as a solution to many of the deployment challenges.