A Cloud-based Architecture for Remote Access to Digital Fabrication Services for Education

摘要

Fabrication-as-a-Service (FaaS) represents a method and a set of innovative solutions for the next generation fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs). It leverages cloud and IoT technologies to enable a wide learning community to have remote access to these labs' computer-controlled tools and equipment over the Internet. This paper introduces FaaS in the context of Fab Lab challenges and describes FaaS instantiation in NEWTON Fab Labs, part of an European Horizon 2020 project. The NEWTON Fab Labs architecture is described in details with a major focus on the communication protocol stack. The system has been deployed and a test scenario that simulates a real user behavior has been set-up in order to stress system performance and measure the system response time in different operating conditions.