The customer: Makers Consulting

Makers Consulting is an Enterprise Solution Integrator offering IT solutions and services.

The Business Requirement

Makers required a virtual laboratory to accommodate its teaching and research activities into satellite and wireless 802.11 networks.

The chief system requirements included concurrent web-based accessibility and the complete automation and management of equipment forming the basis of the remote laboratory.

The virtual laboratory was required to facilitate research into:
  1. performance of two types of transport protocol - connection-less and connection-orientated, both in terrestrial and satellite environments;
  2. bandwidth-sharing and telecommunication network congestion;
  3. routing;
  4. configuration of 802.11 wireless networks;
  5. performance of different transport protocols under different topologies and user modes in the 802.11 network.

The NetSense Solution

The integrated system designed and implemented by NetSense is illustrated in the figure below.

It consists of:

• a centralised system managing web access;
• a ‘distributed’ system for platform regulation;
• two test platforms;
• configuration and analysis of service performance of full mesh network with satellite link;
• configuration and service parameters of a 802.11b LAN.

The entire laboratory is run via a web-based software interface based on Java Servlet Page technology. In order to check the state of the remote equipment, NetSense developed a distributed software system based on Java and GNU/Linux operating system.

The Result

Flexibility and expandability have practically become prerequisites of modern hardware and software architecture.

NetSense’s virtual laboratory not only incorporated these two characteristics but also guaranteed a level of transparency and accessibility which could only be provided by solutions based on open-source operating systems and tools.

Another notable feature of the solution is the web interface's ability to enable access to stored configurations and results of previously performed tests. This solution allows the user to save and compare multiple ongoing tests and their corresponding results.