The Future of Internet
Research testbeds
3.7 Research and Experimentation testbeds
In FP6, Research Networking has supported several testbeds that contributed to experimentally driven research and have become an important asset for the future. While in FP6 testbeds were linked to rather incremental research, they will be involved in much more ambitious endeavours in FP7 and provide the means to experiment with new architectures. Testbeds allow participants to share the cost, bring together partners with heterogeneous capabilities, test interoperability and give the opportunity to see problems from complex interactions.
To build the foundation for a future Internet, the objective on “new paradigms and experimental facilities” has been defined in FP7. Its twofold focus is:
- (a) on advanced networking approaches to architectures and protocols to cope with the increased scale, resilience, complexity, mobility, security and transparency of the Future Internet, coupled with their validation in large scale testing environments based on a combination of physical and ‘virtual’ infrastructures;
- (b) interconnected testbeds addressing novel distributed and reconfigurable protocol architectures, novel distributed network and service architectures, infrastructures and software platforms, and advanced embedded or overlay security, trust and identity management architectures and technologies.
The research and experimentation testbeds is the focus of one of the objectives within the Challenge 1 of the 2007-2008 ICT Work-programme.
The research focus will be:
- long term multidisciplinary research on future Internet paradigms;
- being open to fresh bottom-up ideas with no backwards-compatibility constraints;
- building on Research Networking testbeds;
- considering at the same time technological, economic and social/policy aspects;
- building in, from the outset and on all levels, the right balance between security/accountability and privacy.
The experimentation focus will be:
- large scale experimentation of new paradigms and concepts for the future internet and related service architectures (learning through broad experimentation with research results and integrating and validating new concepts developed in multiple research disciplines);
- federating and extending existing testbeds and research infrastructures (no backwards-compatibility constraints);
- following a European approach and developing a European identity (considering at the same time technological, economic and social/policy aspects).