A secure, scalable and versatile multi-layer client–server architecture for remote intelligent data processing

In recent years, the need for data collection and analysis is growing in many scientific disciplines. This is consequently causing an increase of research in automated data management and data mining to create reliable methods for data analysis. To deal with the need for smart environments and big computational resources, some previous works proposed to address the problem by moving on remote processing, with the aim of sharing supercomputer resources, algorithms and costs. Following this trend, in this work we propose an architecture for advanced remote data processing in a secure, smart and versatile client–server environment that is capable of integrating pre-existing local software. In order to assess the feasibility of our proposal, we developed a case study in the context of an image-based medical diagnostic environment. Our tests demonstrated that the proposed architecture has several benefits: increase of the system throughput, easy upgradability, maintainability and scalability. Moreover, for the scenario we have considered, the system showed a very low transmission overhead which settles on about 2.5 % for the widespread 10/100 mbps. Security has been achieved using client–server certificates and up-to-date standards. © 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.