A Novel Solution For Addressing Network Firewall Issues In Remote Laboratory Development

Abstract

The increased use of remote laboratories for online education has made network security issues ever more critical. To defend against numerous new types of potential attacks, the complexity of network firewalls has been significantly increased. Consequently, the network firewall will inevitably limit the real time remote experimental data transmission. To solve the issue of traversing network firewalls, we designed and implemented a novel real-time experimental data transmission solution which includes two parts, real-time experiment control data transmission and real-time experiment video streaming transmission, for remote laboratory development. To implement real-time experiment control data transmission, a new web server software architecture was designed and developed to allow the traversing of network firewalls. With this new software architecture, the public network port 80 can be shared between Node.js, which is a stable server-side software engine to support real-time communication web applications, and the Apache web server software system. With this new approach, the Apache web server application still listens to the public network port 80, but any client requests for the Node.js web server application through the port will be forwarded to a special network port which Node.js web server application is listening to. Accordingly, a new solution in which both Apache and Node.js web server applications work together via HTTP proxy developed by the Node-HTTP-Proxy software package is implemented on the server-side. With this new real time experiment control and data transmission solution, the end user can control remote experiments and view experimental data on the web browser without firewall issues and without the need of third party plug-ins. It also provides a new approach for the remote experiment control and real time data transmission based on pure HTTP protocol. To implement real-time experiment video transmission part, we developed a complete novel solution via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol and FFMPEG that is a powerful cross-platform command line video trans-code/encoding software package on the server side. In this paper, a novel, real-time video streaming transmission approach based on HLS for the remote laboratory development is presented. With this new solution, the terminal users can view the real-time experiment live video streaming on any portable device without any firewall issues or the need for a third party plug-in. We have successfully implemented this novel real-time experiment data transmission solution in the remote SVP experiment and remote SMA experiment development. End users can now conduct the SVP and SMA remote experiment and view the experiment data and video in real time through web browsers anywhere that has internet connection without any third party plug-in. Consequently, this novel real-time experiment data transmission solution gives the unified framework significant improvements.