The Internet is much more than a communication system. New and unexpected Internet enabled applications and services make tremendous use of emerging technologies and at the same time shape new requirements for future ones. At a global level, the Internet is becoming more and more the backbone of modern economy and society, to the point where new generations from industrialised countries cannot even conceive a world without Internet.
Due to these multiple interactions, the Internet consolidates as a complex system, a living and evolving entity, where any technological development affecting its future may have multifaceted and even unexpected consequences, at any technological, social or economic level. Therefore, new proposals for Internet architectures, protocols and services should not be limited only to paperwork, as they need early experimentation and testing in large-scale environments, even though some of these ideas might be implemented only in the long-term.
The FIRE - Future Internet Research and Experimentation - Initiative is addressing this need, and gearing itself towards creating a multidisciplinary research environment for investigating and experimentally validating highly innovative and revolutionary ideas for new networking and service paradigms. FIRE is promoting the concept of experimentally-driven research, joining the two ends of academic-driven visionary research and industry-driven testing and experimentation. To make this approach a reality, FIRE aims to create a dynamic, sustainable, large-scale European Experimental Facility, which is built by gradually connecting and federating existing and new testbeds for emerging or future Internet technologies.