Latency Resistant Safety in Distributed Remote Laboratories

Abstract

This work will focus on the problems of creating a safe distributed laboratory. We explicitly will not discuss how to make individual elements of an experiment safe, as this is highly application-dependent. Instead, the goal is to find and evaluate different methods to detect and respond to fault conditions that an individual laboratory device might detect. Specifically, the methods should differentiate between user-based faults and those introduced through network communications. We develop a mathematical model to simulate distributed laboratories. We will introduce (time-dependent) network latency and jitter between all elements. Based on the model, a discrete event simulation is created. This simulation environment simulates three different fault detecting methods: the token method, the timestamp method, and the full-state-transfer method. We will compare detection ratios, bandwidth usage, and memory usage between the three methods based on the simulation.