Later in November, the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) officially adopted Recommendation Q.4068 “Open application program interfaces (APIs) for interoperable testbed federations”, turning the Fed4FIRE+ open API into a global standard. Several European telecommunication operators and Fed4FIRE+ – through Mandat International – agreed on the need to establish a Focus Group to continue the work and include other Standardization Development Organizations (SDOs).
During the last plenary meeting of the ITU-T Study Group 11, it was officially approved the creation of the Focus Group “Testbeds Federations for IMT-2020 and beyond” (FG-TBFxG).
Focus Group “Testbeds Federations for IMT-2020 and beyond”
The Focus Group will leverage and align with the testbeds federation reference model defined in the Recommendation ITU-T Q.4068 successfully initiated by Fed4FIRE+. The Focus Group will research, develop, specify APIs and define use cases for federated testbeds and utilisation of the APIs, based on the work already mentioned in the Recommendation.
One of the objectives is to harmonize the specifications of testbeds across SDOs and other relevant fora. The Focus Group TBF-TBFxG also encourages all the interested stakeholders, such as SDOs, fora, research communities, testbed users, testbed providers, open-source projects, to collaborate to its future activities, in particular, to contribute to the APIs development, to share the APIs specifications and to create new use cases and services for the testbed providers.
The activities will start in 2022 and will last one year from their first meeting. Everyone coming from an ITU-T country member can join. Active contributors are welcome, including national, regional and international organisations.
You can find more details about the Focus Group FG-TBFxG on its dedicated Web page at www.itu.int/go/fgtbf.
