A two-day workshop organized jointly by the standardization development organizations, International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T), ETSI, and IEEE, was held on 15-16 March 2021. The workshop focused on interoperability standardization reference model and APIs and addressed a wide variety of stakeholders, including research communities, industry representatives, testbed owners and users, infrastructure vendors, suppliers for ICT, and regulators.
This event allowed Mandat International, one of the Fed4FIRE+ partners and owner of the IoT Lab testbed to present the current standardization activities exploited in the context of the Fed4FIRE+ project. The draft Recommendation ITU-T Q.API4TB “Open APIs for interoperable testbed federations” describes the APIs used in Fed4FIRE+ to federate and interconnect all the testbeds and will serve to the elaboration of a reference model for the testbed federations. This work is currently supported not only by ITU-T SG11 but also by ETSI TC INT.
During the workshop, a presentation of the main testbed federations across the world, including Fed4FIRE+, has been delivered.
The discussion around the testbed interoperability was one of the outcomes of the workshop as it has demonstrated its high-value creation for education, research, and innovation. Moreover, the testbed interoperability showed several advantages, such as international cooperation, research resource mutualization, scalability and large-scale tests, and validation. Furthermore, via a testbed federation, it is possible to support technology convergence and interoperability in a real latency environment for global services.
The workshop was considered very successful by the different SDOs as it clearly illustrated the need to standardize APIs facilitating the testbed federations, including 5G and beyond 5G experimentations. The three SDOs will collaborate on this topic; some steps have already been taken after the joint workshop on how to concretely advance in the standardization process by the SDOs and other stakeholders. A lot of expectations are put in the reference model to make the testbed interoperable and federated through the open APIs, providing new online services to develop and test new technological solutions in real conditions.
If you are interested to learn more about the workshop, you can access the full recording here: https://itu.zoom.us/rec/play/c-oTNlDdp2J_qfm5tH3c_irtLN1_emXADs_OZr26Vc5QiWoB7NGgrQVR_fULhn6dhyo4iz9zC6UumSeu.SqL8ySrtzZa01WQJ?continueMode=true&_x_zm_rtaid=U1WM7lj5TH2gk7RsbD9vDg.1615973823733.184fbebb0040652ebaedda9b0e4d87ce&_x_zm_rhtaid=738
