In August 2021, Fed4FIRE+ open application program interfaces (API) became a global standard for the federation and interconnection of testbeds. This was possible thanks to the official adoption of the Recommendation Q.4068 “Open application program interfaces (APIs) for interoperable testbed federations” by the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).
The Recommendation presents a generic reference model for testbed federation, improving the interoperability among the different testbeds used in the ICT domain. The Recommendation also describes the APIs already used by GENI and Fed4FIRE+, illustrating how to concretely instantiate the generic reference model in real testbed federations. These open APIs allow the federation and the interconnection of all the testbeds.
The Recommendation is the result of the collaboration with ITU-T Study Group 11 – Signalling requirements, protocols, and test specifications, and ETSI Technical Committee (TC) Core Network and Interoperability Testing (INT). Mandat International, a partner of the Fed4FIRE+ project and member of ITU-T, took part in the drafting of the “Open APIs for interoperable testbed federations” section.
To include also other Standardization Development Organizations (SDOs), a Focus Group was launched. The Focus Group “Testbeds Federations for IMT-2020 and beyond” (FG-TBFxG) will leverage and align with the testbeds federation reference model defined in the Recommendation ITU-T Q.4068 successfully initiated by Fed4FIRE+.
Find out more about the Focus Group and contribute to the work: www.itu.int/go/fgtbf
