Experimental characterization of wireless and wired access in distributed laboratories

Remote access to distributed resources, such as instruments is one of the more important challenges to increase the value of laboratories of excellence. Through a telemeasurement platform enabling cooperative experiments involving distributed resources, users would be able to reach the workbenches, configure instrumentation, programmable circuits and network cameras thus controlling the entire system under test. First, this paper investigates different kinds of instrument connections in order to allow remote access, and their performances in terms of response time of remote commands compliant with IEEE488 standard. The different types of access techniques, investigated at our laboratory, are: GPIB-ENET, IEEE802.3 LAN and Wireless IEEE802.11b connections. Second, the refresh rate of NI LabVIEW remote virtual panels representing the instrumentations estimated for various access techniques is characterize.