The SoftFIRE Consortium kindly invites applications to its Challenge on NFV/SDN/5G technologies for original developments, experiments, trials and tests to be carried out on its virtualized and federated testbed infrastructure. The project is seeking groundbreaking proposals to move these technologies one step further and solve the many issues that still are present. The challenge is an incredible opportunity for practitioners and experts of the sector to showcase how their technological solutions can improve virtualization platforms, or to show how new compelling services and applications can be developed on top of an NFV/SDN middleware.
Challenge objectives
For this Challenge, SoftFIRE is especially interested in receiving proposals that address
- the interoperability/extension of the platform,
- the creation/consolidation of services and/or
- the creation of applications on top of the infrastructure
This challenge is very broad in principle and it aims at demonstrating the conformity, compliance and consistency of the NFV/SDN framework to the requirements of networked applications and in particular the nascent 5G realms.
This Challenge call is seeking proposals that cover the entire spectrum of NFV/SDN applicability from new approaches to NFV security, SDN programmability, and software architecture evolution towards 5G, as well as infrastructural integration of experimental access networks with the platform.
Challenge streams
Proposals should fall under at least one of these streams:
- Interworking: This stream addresses issues related to interoperability of the current platform with other infrastructures.
- Programmability: This stream is devoted to experimentations that use the programmable APIs of the platform or extend them in order to program or to ease application programming and to reuse services/functions offered by the platform.
- Security: This stream addresses the possible extensions to the platform for increasing the security levels offered to potential stakeholders of SoftFIRE.
Please note that a proposal can be submitted for more than one stream. In their proposal, applicants must indicate which stream(s) the proposal is related with.
Prizes
Three prizes for each stream will be awarded to winning competitors, based on the outcome of the Challenge, emphasizing the creativeness and technical proficiency in provided solutions applied to the SoftFIRE federated testbed running an NFV/SDN environment. The total allocated prize budget and the three prizes per stream are the following:
For each stream 75.000 divided in following prizes:
- € 40.000 First Prize
- € 25.000 Second Prize
- € 10.000 Third Prize
Total Budget: € 225.000 in form of prizes (for all three streams).
Evaluation of Proposals
In evaluating received proposals, the main criteria will be on the added creativity and technical soundness. Evaluators will also consider how the SoftFIRE platform will be used in order to reach the proposal objectives.
The first 6 highly ranked proposals for each stream will be selected for the Demo at FEC3 in Paris on March 13th, 2018.
Proposal Submission Information
- Type of participants: The typical profile of participants is academics, industrial organisations, or SMEs active in the domain of NFV/SDN and 5G research and virtualised applications that want to run a demo of their newly developed solutions and applications. The rules of participation are described in the SoftFIRE Challenge Call: https://www.softfire.eu/open-calls/softfire-challenge
- Proposal submission: Online submission through the SoftFIRE portal
- Call deadline EXTENDED: 4 February 2018
- Detailed Call Information: SoftFIRE Challenge Call
More information on the SoftFIRE web.
