Morse Reseach group

Fed4FIRE is an Integrating Project under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) addressing the work programme topic Future Internet Research and Experimentation. It started in October 2012 and will run for 48 months, until the end of September 2016.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Experimentally driven research is considered to be a key factor for growing the European Internet industry. In order to enable this type of RTD activities, a number of projects for building a European facility for Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) have been launched, each project targeting a specific community within the Future Internet ecosystem. Through the federation of these infrastructures, innovative experiments become possible that break the boundaries of these domains. Besides, infrastructure developers can utilize common tools of the federation, allowing them to focus on their core testbed activities.

Recent projects have already successfully demonstrated the advantages of federation within a community. The Fed4FIRE project intends to implement the next step in these activities by successfully federating across the community borders and offering openness for future extensions.

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL OBJECTIVES

Fed4FIRE will pursue the following scientific and technical objectives:

• Open, accessible and reliable facilities supporting a wide variety of different Internet research communities
• Simple, efficient, and cost effective experimental processes
• Increased trustworthiness of facilities
• Sustainability of the experimental infrastructures

TECHNICAL APPROACH

Fed4FIRE will establish a common federation framework by developing, adapting or adopting tools that support experiment lifecycle management, monitoring and trustworthiness. A large number of existing experimentation facilities in Europe will be adapted to seamlessly integrate in the federation. Such facilities typically focus on different kinds of networking related research or on different communities regarding services and applications. Example domains are optical networking, wireless networking, software defined networking, cloud computing, grid computing, smart cities, etc. Therefore the federation will have to support a very heterogeneous set of requirements. To guarantee that the federation framework meets all of them, representatives of all these FIRE research communities will be actively involved in the definition of the federation architecture. Each of them will also lead the uptake of the Fed4FIRE platform in their specific community.

SCOPE OF THE FEDERATION FRAMEWORK

The Fed4FIRE federation framework will enable experiments that combine facilities from the different FIRE research communities. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, researchers from different Future Internet areas will be invited through Open Calls to perform innovative experiments using the Fed4FIRE federation. Their experiences will be used to further develop the federation framework. Additional infrastructures will also be invited to join the consortium.