Platform independent architecture for distributed measurement systems

This paper describes a software architecture that can be employed to exercise a distributed measurement system. The proposed architecture allows many users to simultaneously access instruments physically located in different sites, to program them and to gather the measurement results. The multi-user capability is obtained by means of an intelligent queuing process, while the multi-instrument access is accomplished by means of a self-synchronizing architecture. The developed software is platform independent both on instrument and user sides thanks to the use of an Http-based protocol and of Java components. The proposed system embeds robust security mechanisms with user identification and encrypted transactions.