CORDIS

The Fed4FIRE+ project continues on the legacy from the FP7 Fed4FIRE project as being the top Internet and Network-related experimentation federation at this moment.
The Fed4FIRE+ project has the clear objective to run and further improve Fed4FIRE’s “best-in-town” federation of experimentation facilities for the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative. To achieve this, the project will:
- further exploit, enlarge and build a federated set of facilities
- aim for an open federation for experimentation by industry and research organisations, through the organization of Open Calls and Open Access mechanisms;
- continuously upgrade and improve the facilities and include technical innovations and increased user satisfaction
- create an open market-place for customers of testing services
The federation focuses on fixed and wireless network infrastructures, services and applications, and combinations thereof in the domains of cloud computing, big data analysis, media delivery networks, smart cities, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT). The project has established a flexible, demand-driven framework which allows test facilities to join during the course of its lifetime. During the course of this reporting period, already several new testbeds have either joined the federation or are working on compliant with the Fed4FIRE+ federation. These testbeds have joined via contacts with other research projects in the field.
The project is also building on Fed4FIRE’s existing community of experimenters, testbeds and tool developers and bring them together regularly (two times a year) in engineering conferences to have maximal interaction between the different stakeholders involved.
Fed4FIRE+ provides added value to its stakeholders: experimenters, testbed providers and partnering organizations and projects. For the experimenters this means easy and low cost access to a wide variety of different testbed facilities through a one-stop shop with first-level support. For testbed providers this implies reaching out to a wider and more diverse community, increased visibility and opportunity to add new enhanced functionality.

The activities in the Fed4FIRE-project are grouped in 3 major cycles: the Innovation Cycle, the Business Cycle and the Experiment Cycle (Figure 1). Centrally placed are the activities on the Federator (covered by WP2) which takes care of running the actual federation.
The aim of the Federator (WP2) is to operate and manage the federation, through the support, as primary stakeholders, of the testbeds. This work also included setting up the sustainability working group which already adopted an initial sustainability plan based on the analysis of the existing federation models, of their sustainability and of how they can be replicated to Fed4FIRE+’s model.
In total, 3 Fed4FIRE+ Engineering Conferences took place during this period: in Ghent (BE), Volos (GR) and Paris (FR). These events consist in a mix of plenary and parallel sessions and they are a perfect opportunity for researchers and developers, to exchange experiences and inspire each other. In total, around 250 people attended these conferences and several projects were invited to the different editions.

With respect to the Innovation Cycle, the activities are aimed at filling in the technical missing gaps to improve the performance, the user-friendliness as well as the technical capabilities of the existing Fed4FIRE federation and tools. This would allow the existing infrastructure to evolve more towards a production federation and ready for future sustainability. During this reporting period, activities focused on “SLA and reputation support”, “Experiment as a Service”, “Monitoring” and “Onthology”.

With respect to the Business Cycle, the initial framework for the one-stop-shop was developed and published. The objective is to create an open market‐ place for customers of testing services by brokering across federated testbed resources (from different providers) as well as human / expert resources allowing for on‐demand booking of testing and experimentation resources and services.
For this, the initial Testbed as a Service (TaaS) gap analysis has been executed at the beginning of the project, as initially planned.

With respect to the Experiment Cycle during the reporting period, 4 Fed4FIRE+ open calls have been defined and implemented. The Open Calls are organized for various types of experiments: Extra small, Small, Medium, and Large. One of the organized open calls was dedicated to SME experimenters.
Fed4FIRE+ runs a system of more standardized Open Calls, as well as new and more innovative concepts of Open Calls. These new concepts are introduced on the basis of the feedback gathered from the experimenters as well as input gathered through other projects as e.g. HUB4NGI.
Altogether, 96 proposals have been received through the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Open Calls and 36 of them were accepted (Figure 2).

"The impact of Fed4FIRE+ can be seen on different levels. There is of course the direct impact of the project on the experimenters as they are the most obvious stakeholders for the project. There is however also an impact on the testbeds and the partners running the testbeds. The project and the use of the testbeds provides feedback, comments and new requirements for the testbeds to be kept updated and at the top level.
Besides these 2 groups of stakeholders, the project also has an impact on the other H2020-research projects in the area of NGI and related fields and consequently also on the workprogram itself.

Impact on Experimenters:
A first issue to consider is the geographical spreads of the proposals and of the accepted experiments received which are shown below in Figure 3 and also the type of organisation involved. From Figure 4 it is clear that Fed4FIRE+ has a major focus on SMEs. For these exeperimenters, running the experiment on Fed4FIRE+ has had a major impact on their business (Figure 5). The objective of Fed4FIRE+ is to lower the threshold for SMEs to use the testbed facilities to work on, test and improve their products. It is clear that this objective is also reached from the feedback received by the experimenters. As for some organisations (e.g. research organisations, academic groups,…) the experiment is not really linked to a product, some responses show “not applicable”, but for the others it is clear that running the experiment was part and contributed to improving the product during development and before going to market (Figure 6).

Impact on Testbed providers:
Running experiments on the Fed4FIRE+ testbeds also has a significant impact on the testbed providers themselves, either by collecting feedback on running and operating the testbed, as well as on new or continued projects and contacts with stakeholders (Figure 7), but the best overview and summary of the impact is shown in Figure 8.

Besides these ""obvious"" stakeholders, Fed4FIRE+ also has an impact on other research projects as some of the facilities are used within those projects or are cosely linked to other organisations worldwide."