Our society is undoubtedly rapidly evolving towards a fully digital society and while a few years ago, when the Fed4FIRE- and Fed4FIRE+ project were concepted, that this society would evolve on the basis of a “Future Internet”, this has gradually changed into a completely Next Generation Internet. This change in labelling is significant as it stresses the fact that we are not just working on an evolving internet, but bridging a generation step by implementing completely new concepts, ideas, tools, features, … This change goes in parallel with the emergence of 5G, (I)IoT, Cloud computing, Edge computing ,.. and many other new concepts.
These changes and new technologies which are getting embedded in our new society, the communication networks and the internet, are very complex and rely on a heterogeneity of technologies never seen or experienced before. Research on these new concepts and aspects of our Next Generation Internet, developing tools, techniques and applications as well as testing cannot be carried out without experimentation.
Existing federation efforts, prior to the start of this project, such as Fed4FIRE, XIFI, IoT Lab, OneLab, etc., brought together heterogeneous facilities and made them accessible through common frameworks and tools, thus supporting a broad range of experimenter communities covering a wide variety of Internet infrastructures, services and applications.
The heterogeneity of the federated testbeds, as well as the near-real environment in which experimenters can develop and test their applications and techniques have proven to be very useful during the course of the FP7 Fed4FIRE federation project (running from 01/10/2013 till 30/09/2016). This project has developed a common federation framework that is widely adopted by different experimentation facilities and used by different experimentation communities within academia and industry. Powerful support is provided for the whole experiment lifecycle, covering tools and interfaces for discovery and reservation of resources, experiment control, measurements, monitoring, identity management, access control, accountability and SLA management.
The Fed4FIRE+ project has continued since its start on 01/01/2017 on this legacy as the top Internet and Network-related experimentation federation at this moment. Several players and stakeholders have already stressed the huge positive impact Fed4FIRE has made on the landscape and the fact that Fed4FIRE has become a reference point in the community, within as well as outside EU. Since the start, through the mechanism of Open Calls and Cascade Granting, the project has already received about 400 proposals for experiments, out of which more than 150 have been selected for funding. More than half of these are newcomers to Fed4FIRE+, experimenters who have never been in contact either with Fed4FIRE or Fed4FIRE+. Some of these newcomers originate from parties who have been participated in other NGI projects so work out some basic concepts and use Fed4FIRE+ facilities to further explore possibilities and testing.
The Fed4FIRE+ project also looks beyond the end of the project and has incorporated a set of specific tasks and deliverables to investigate the operation of a federation and the sustainability. These activities have resulted in the SLICES initiative in the area of European Research Infrastructures.
