Akshit Gureja supervised by Dr. Sachin Chaudhari received his Master of Science – Dual Degree  in  Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE). Here’s a summary of his research work on Engineering Remote Labs: A Software Perspective:

Remote labs are a technological breakthrough for accessing scientific knowledge, pushing the boundaries of traditional approaches to practical learning. They seek to provide students with unrestricted access to laboratory education and experimentation. Remote labs further prove invaluable in today’s times when pandemics such as COVID-19, geopolitical crises, and climatic conditions constantly threaten students’ access to practical learning in their institutions. Remote labs in such circumstances allow students remote access to practical equipment and laboratory resources. However, most of the developed remote labs today, either run on private networks, are specific to certain science domains, are too costly to replicate or require software installations, all of which hinder universal access to knowledge and education. With this motivation, the work presented in this thesis focuses on building a scalable software framework for real-time remote experimentation for Internet of Things (IoT)-based remote labs with low latency video streaming. This thesis is structured to comprise two parts. First, it explores the components and sequence flow of the developed end-to-end software architecture, emphasising the key design decisions for implementing the software solution and video streaming. It also discusses the introduction of an interoperability layer to support multiple IoT platforms and the implementation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming. The work further evaluates the developed architecture for its latency and capability of handling larger loads as the system scales. Secondly, the thesis also proposes the approach of multi-user multiplexing to address the scalability of remote labs hosting science experiments with near-instantaneous outputs based on electric currents, such as Kirchhoff’s laws. Such experiments and hardware nodes present a unique case compared to other practical experiments involving mechanical actuation. Multi-user multiplexing aims to provide users with concurrent access to the hardware nodes without impacting other users’ experience. The architecture proposed earlier can be modified slightly and adapted using WebSockets to facilitate the implementation of multi-user multiplexing. The modified WebSocket-based architecture constitutes three layers in contrast to the proposed four-layer architecture, and the two have been compared for their performance on latency and round trip time as part of this work.

April 2025