IoT Remote Group Experiments in the Cyber Laboratory: A FPGA-based Remote Laboratory in the Hybrid Cloud

Abstract

In accordance with the resent advancement in Internet of Things (IoT), the needs for IoT experiment platform have been ever increasing. IoT system consists of various technologies such as networking, sensor controller, edge-side computing, server-side big data collections, analysis and their visualizations. An experimental environment that can handle the development and experiments of such an IoT system become important. In the IoT system, a highly flexible system structure for applications using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is required. The authors propose the Remote Laboratory System for handling IoT experiments in the Cyber Laboratory, which is an educational FPGA-based remote laboratory for under-graduate university students. It enables not only to use available board-level small computers but also to use FPGA boards for prototyping IoT edges. It can also organize the IoT cloud-server side programs in the hybrid cloud. The FPGA based edge-side computing approach can have much more freedom and flexibility to implement various sensor controls those can be customized for specific IoT applications. The use of free micro-processor IP-core and re-organizing the available FPGA CAD design platform allow us to reduce the burden of design and implementation efforts for the construction of new Cyber Laboratory to accommodate IoT designs and experiments. It also contributed to reduce the students' amount of efforts to conduct their own IoT design and experiments, where students are required to have various skills in Information Technologies (IT): hardware design, edge-side computing, server-side computing, networking and infrastructure construction. The use of the Docker container/Swarm and the Docker File contributed to construct their own IoT experiment platforms for every student automatically, in the form of Infrastructure as Code. Furthermore, these separately designed IoT experiment platforms can be combined to conduct a group of group experiment simultaneously. The paper showed the Cyber Laboratory's usefulness and applicability for IoT kinds of Remote experiments.