Federation of Next Generation Internet Experimentation Facilities: Fed4FIRE+ kicked off!

Enabling federation of large-scale experimental facilities to ground the Next Generation Internet

Federation of innovative large-scale experimental facilities is crucial to ground the foundation of  the Next Generation Internet to enable addressing technological opportunities arising from advances in various research fields, extending from new network architectures and software-defined infrastructures to new concepts for services and applications.

The Horizon 2020 Fed4FIRE+ project has the objective to run and further improve federation of top-notch experimentation facilities to enable and ground the development of a Next Generation Internet, by starting from the Fed4FIRE testbeds. By federating heterogeneous facilities covering technologies ranging from wireless, wired, cloud services and open flow, and making them accessible through common frameworks and tools is crucial to open up new possibilities, supporting a broad range of experimenter communities covering a wide variety of Internet infrastructures, services and applications.

Fed4FIRE+, which started on 01 January 2017 and will run until the end of 2021, comprises 21 organizations from 12 different countries, namely imec (Belgium), Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (France), Fraunhofer‐Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Angewandten Forschung E.V, Technische Universitaet Berlin and Eurescom‐European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications GmbH (Germany), National Technical University of Athens and Center for Research and Technology (Greece), Martel Innovate and Mandat International (Switzerland), University of Southampton and Geant Limited (UK), National ICT Australia Limited (Australia), Atos Spain Sa, Fundacio Privada I2cat, Internet i Innovacio Digital a Catalunya, Universidad de Cantabria and Universidad de Málaga (Spain), Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Poland), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), Institut Jozef Stefan (Slovenia), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Nordunet A/S (Denmark).

A first meeting of the Fed4FIRE+ project was hosted by imec, the Project Coordinator, and held in Gent (BE). It was organized together with the final meeting of FED4FIRE project to provide all participants with the opportunity to decide upon the direction and principles of the federation, define the technical and legal requirements needed for a testbed to join the infrastructure community, to evaluate what demand‐driven extensions are needed, to prepare the first Fed4FIRE+ Open Call for experimentation and start organisation of the 1^st Engineering Conference to be held 14-16th March 2017 in Ghent.

Martel Innovate will play a crucial role in Fed4FIRE+ by leading community building and communication activities in support of all target stakeholders, including both industry and academia, to engage into the Fed4FIRE+ initiatives to develop, validate and exploit their R&D efforts and outcomes. Martel, thanks to its consolidated position and experience in the Future Internet Research and Experimentation landscape, will build strong liaisons to ensure cooperation with others relevant EC (and not only) projects and initiatives especially in the emerging Next Generation Internet initiative. Martel will also assist imec in managing the project and will contribute to create an open marketplace for customers of testing services by brokering across federated testbed resources (from different providers) as well as human/expert resources allowing for on‐demand booking of testing and experimentation resources and services.

More to come within the next few weeks: stay Tunhed! The new Fed4FIRE+ web site is being developed by Martel, meanwhile find out specific information about the first Open Call of Fed4FIRE+ online!

Follow Fed4FIRE+ on Twitter HERE.