Performance Evaluation of the DORII Instrument Element Data Transfer Capabilities Luca Berruti, Franco Davoli, Stefano Vignola, and Sandro Zappatore Abstract The possibility of accessing and managing remote laboratories by exploiting the facilities offered by the Internet represents a challenging issue. To this purpose, many research projects have been funded and different hardware/software solutions have been proposed. A possible approach to the problem may consist of adopting a grid-based platform to expose and share the resources present in a group of laboratories in a uniform way. Recent projects have proposed a complex and complete architecture that enables Internet users to remotely control instrumentation and perform experiments. According to such architecture, the instrument element (IE) represents the basic abstraction that allows physical instrumentation to be exposed as a web service and to become a manageable resource in a grid environment. This chapter aims at evaluating the performance of the transfer of data generated by the instruments from the IE to a multiplicity of users. The evaluation is performed under different traffic load values, generated by the acquisition of measurements, with different numbers of clients connected to the system, and by means of two different data transfer methodologies supported by the IE. The results related to a large number of tests are presented and discussed. 1 Introduction Remotely controlling a laboratory and the related instruments and devices, sending commands, and acquiring measurements are not new activities in the instrumenta- tion and measurement scenario – they have been performed in a whole range of different applications. However, the goals of recent remote instrumentation service L. Berruti • F. Davoli () • S. Vignola • S. Zappatore DIST-University of Genoa/CNIT, University of Genoa Research Unit, Genoa, Italy e-mail: luca.berruti@cnit.it; franco@dist.unige.it; stefano.vignola@cnit.it; sandro.zappatore@unige.it F. Davoli et al. (eds.), Remote Instrumentation for eScience and Related Aspects, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0508-5 2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 15