FUTEBOL has established federated, distributed research infrastructure in Europe and Brazil suited for integrated optical/wireless/cloud network experimentation, allowing local and remote experimenters to access facilities in a unified manner, and to make use of a heterogeneous set of computing, wireless, and optical resources in distributed testbeds. FUTEBOL has successfully adopted the Fed4FIRE approach towards the federation of the testbeds located on both sides of the Atlantic, enabling local and remote access to such testbeds. These include three testbeds in Europe (at TCD, University of Bristol, and VTT), and three new testbeds established in Brazil (at UFRGS, UFES, and UFMG). Data from Fed4FIRE indicates that these testbeds have been accessed by external experimenters through Fed4FIRE more than 7,000 times since their federation. The project also developed a converged control framework that enables the control and orchestration of optical, wireless, and cloud resources for experiments that involve multiple network domains. The software components that comprise the FUTEBOL control framework are available under open source licenses through the project’s GitLab repository. We have showcased the FUTEBOL research infrastructure and control framework through five experiments that focus on issues of direct relevance to 5G and beyond, including spectrum sharing, virtualisation and orchestration wireless and optical network resources, low-latency services for robot control over wireless-optical infrastructures, the use of cloud and fog computing for the Internet of Things (IoT), and radio-over-fibre technology for IoT devices. This work was disseminated through 78 peer-reviewed publications, numerous demonstrations in public events, discussions with telecommunications regulators in Brazil and Europe, and contributions to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The project’s open call and open access process has led to the participation of academic institutions and SMEs in Europe and Latin America in the use of the infrastructure and software tools developed in the project.
