The EU DG Connect and the US National Science foundation established a joint EU-US committee bring together researchers from both sides of the Atlantic. The committee was asked to discuss the joint development of research-focused networking testbeds and identify joint research opportunities. The committee was organized as two subcommittees, focusing on two broad areas: “Next Generation Internet (NGI)” and “Advanced Wireless Platforms”. The committee met for a workshop at the DG CONNECT premises in Brussels on June 26-27, 2017. The workshop was collocated with the “Net Futures Conference 2017”, which included an “EU-US session on next generation internet” on June 28.
The joint committee built on the well-established US-EU collaboration on network testbeds (GENI/FIRE). The workshop was organized as two parallel tracks, discussing Next Generation Internet and Advanced Wireless Platform testbed infrastructure and joint research opportunities. The NGI track focused on identifying:
- Joint research opportunities that can benefit from international collaboration, and
- Enhancements and extension to existing FIRE and GENI testbeds to support that research.
The Advanced Wireless Platforms groups focused on joint platform development dedicated to support research in wireless at large.
The two-day workshop resulted in a set of joint recommendations for future collaboration, organized as short, medium and longer term opportunities. The recommendations were to develop the collaboration in following three time-scales:
- In the short run, the focus of collaboration should be on the exchanges of students, platform design and operation engineers, and faculty members.
- In the medium time scale, the collaboration should include joint projects with lightweight management focusing on specific targets and objectives with the main goal of encouraging development of common advanced wireless platform environments as well as collaborative research projects on NGI.
- In the long run, collaboration should include joint development of control/management frameworks as well as joint development of large experimental wireless and NGI platforms (whether collocated or as a multiple deployments) and architectures.
- The Open Data (ODMP), reproducibility and interoperability features should be considered at a very early stage of any joint design.
