Tapping into the world’s largest federation of experimental internet facilities
The invention of the telegraph was a remarkable technological feat, putting to rest the carrier pigeons and removing the barriers of time and space. But it was the internet that revolutionised the world of communication and global collaboration as we know it. Proposing new technologies for the future internet involves testing these technologies beforehand. In fact, the need for experimentally-driven research and innovation gave rise to the Strategic Experimental Infrastructure for Future Internet Research & Experimentation (FIRE+). Having demonstrated the advantages of a federation of research infrastructures to facilitate experiments under controlled conditions, the next step was to federate across community borders and spanning a wide variety of technologies. “Experimentation is more important than ever,” said Peter Van Daele, project manager. “The objective of our project was to lower the threshold for SMEs, for all kinds of research organisations and large industrial companies and make available the testbeds in the area of next generation internet in Europe. We federated all these testbeds, bringing them all together and we allowed open and free access.” Researchers and innovators from across Europe were invited to put their ICT ideas or solutions to test using the open-access Fed4FIRE+ Testbeds Portal. With a wide range of testbeds covering various technology domains, such as cloud computing, wireless and wired networking, sensor networks, and software-defined networking, the project made it easy for experiments to be set up. One of the advantages of the Fed4FIRE+ testbeds is that they are fully operated remotely and free of charge.
Experimentation with the ‘real’ internet
Starting in 2012 with its predecessor Fed4FIRE, the project has built and run the largest federation of Next Generation Internet (NGI) experimentation facilities in Europe also linking to other testbeds worldwide. From a company developing an interactive app for tourists to bus and coach operators rolling out new scheduling software to agricultural companies testing the use of satellite data, the types of projects participating in testbed platforms came as a pleasant surprise for Van Daele, who is a permanent member from Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) at the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) of Ghent University. “When looking at who was using our testbed facilities, I couldn’t have imagined the wide area of applications,” he said. “Being an electrical engineer, I thought it was all about communications and things like that. This is still true, but the big surprise to me was the extremely wide variety of applications where our facilities are supporting experimental development.” Based on user feedback, the open use of the Fed4FIRE+ federated testbeds proved to be a solid support for European innovators and researchers validating novel solutions in a number of technology domains. Looking back on the project’s five successful years, Van Daele lists sustainability as a major achievement. “There is continuation,” he said. “Our project is continuing beyond the completion of its Horizon 2020 in June 2022.” The project’s sustainability is a key objective to ensure the federation continue to make it quick and easy for users of the wider research community to access the testbeds. Sustainability has been found in the form of an ESFRI project called SLICES (Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies). It will serve as the Fed4FIRE+ legacy.
Keywords
Fed4FIRE+, internet, testbeds, research facilities, federation
