Fed4FIRE+ is a project under the European Union’s Programme Horizon 2020, offering the largest federation worldwide of Next Generation Internet (NGI) testbeds, which provide open, accessible and reliable facilities supporting a wide variety of different research and innovation communities and initiatives in Europe, including the 5G PPP projects and initiatives.
It started in January 2017 and will run for 66 months, until June 2022. The Fed4FIRE+ project is the successor of the Fed4FIRE project.
We are rapidly evolving towards a fully digital society. From the way we pay bills to how we watch a movie in the evening, we daily use a wide range of technology applications. Ensuring the safety and trust of these technologies is a real challenge for research, which must deal with fast-changing requirements and heterogeneous features in a highly competitive environment.
To tackle this challenge, the Fed4FIRE+ project provided open, accessible and reliable interoperable testing facilities to researchers and innovators, fostering the validation of cutting-edge technological solutions and becoming a reference point in the research community.
Project Overview
Experimentally driven research is considered to be a key factor for growing the European Internet industry. In order to enable this type of RTD activity, a number of projects have been launched with the aim to build a European facility for Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE). Each project targets a specific community within the Future Internet ecosystem. The federation of research infrastructures facilitates experiments breaking the boundaries of these domains. Moreover, infrastructure developers can take advantage of the common tools of the federation to focus on their core testbed activities.
Recent projects have already successfully demonstrated the advantages of federation within a community. The Fed4FIRE+ project implemented the next step in these activities by successfully federating across the community borders and offering openness for future extensions.
Scientific and Technical Objectives
Fed4FIRE+ pursued the following scientific and technical objectives:
- Open, accessible and reliable facilities supporting a wide variety of different Internet research communities
- Simple, efficient, and cost-effective experimental processes
- Increased trustworthiness of facilities
- Sustainability of the experimental infrastructures
Technical Approach
Fed4FIRE+ established a common federation framework by developing, adapting or adopting tools that support experiment lifecycle management, monitoring and trustworthiness. A large number of existing experimentation facilities in Europe have been adapted to seamlessly integrate into the federation. Such facilities typically focus on different kinds of networking-related research or on different communities regarding services and applications. Example domains are optical networking, wireless networking, software-defined networking, cloud computing, fog computing, data science applications, smart cities, etc. Therefore, the federation supported a very heterogeneous set of requirements. To guarantee that the federation framework met all of them, representatives of all these FIRE research communities were actively involved in the definition of the federation architecture. Each of them also led the uptake of the Fed4FIRE+ platform in their specific community.
Scope of the Federation Framework
The Fed4FIRE+ federation framework enabled experiments by combining facilities from the different FIRE research communities. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, researchers from different Future Internet areas were invited through Open Calls to run innovative experiments with the Fed4FIRE+ federation. Their experiences were crucial to further developing the federation framework. Additional infrastructures have also joined the consortium.
Project time schedule and opportunities for experiments
The project started in January 2017 and ran for 66 months, until June 2022. During this period of activity, Fed4FIRE+ launched several Open Calls for experiments open to everybody and has also implemented a specific continuous submission process for experiments from SMEs.
The facilities are open and free to all experimenters, even beyond and outside participation in the Fed4FIRE+ Open Calls, until the end of the project. Interested parties to perform experiments on the Fed4FIRE+ facilities are welcome to contact the project at any time to explore opportunities to perform the experiments.
