A Proposed Architecture for Instrumentation Cloud

Abstract

Remote instrumentation and measurement has always been an attractive area to researchers. Studies on grid-enabled instrumentation system have turned many instruments into resources similar to the computing and storage element. However, the advent of cloud computing further inspires the idea of instrumentation service provision rather than resources. Upon this philosophy, this paper proposes an architecture for instrumentation cloud aiming at guiding the development of the unified platform for remote instrumentation resources management and service provision. The design of the architecture is based on the analysis of requirements for future remote instrumentation system. Then, the use case and related activities of the instrumentation cloud system are derived. The detailed architecture and related function modules are designed according to previous system modeling. Finally a discussion is presented to analyze the potential problems that may encounter in developing the instrumentation cloud. However, most of them are just technique issues and can be solved once technology improves. The proposed architecture is a good guide for future development of on-cloud instrumentation system.