Comprehensive Seven-Lens Evaluation Framework for Remote Access Laboratory Systems: Implementation and Performance Optimization
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How to Cite

Amoda, Niket, and Lochan Jolly. 2026. “Comprehensive Seven-Lens Evaluation Framework for Remote Access Laboratory Systems: Implementation and Performance Optimization”. Journal of Trends in Computer Science and Smart Technology 8 (2): 368-88. https://doi.org/10.36548/jtcsst.2026.2.009.

Keywords

Remote Access Laboratories
Seven-Lens Framework
VPN-Based Architecture
WebRTC Streaming
Performance Optimization
Multi-User Pipelining
LabVIEW Integration

Abstract

Remote access labs are an important tool for teaching engineering students’ hands-on skills that they may use in their future careers. To ensure that remote labs will deliver education effectively, they need to be evaluated systematically on many different operational factors. The Seven Lens Assessment Framework is a comprehensive assessment method that assesses remote access lab systems using seven different lenses or operational factors including Affordability, Portability, Scalability, Compatibility, Maintainability, Usability and Universality. Our LabVIEW-based implementation is one of the first demonstrations of how to apply this assessment framework in practice. The implementation reduced the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 55.4%, simplified the deployment process by 89.2%, provided sub-2.5 second latency for up to 70 concurrent users, made the system compatible with eight different platforms, increased the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) by 253%, improved the System Usability Scale (SUS) score by 31.4%, and achieved 95% browser universality. The proposed system utilises native Windows services along with secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections, Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) streaming, and Erlang-C queuing models to optimize the utilization of resources. Systematic assessments were performed against 35 other reviewed remote access labs to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seven Lens Assessment Framework. The Seven Lens Index achieved 0.847 when compared to the baseline systems’ index of 0.472, which represents a 79.4% overall improvement.

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