Report on modular federation of FIRE Facilities

Towards a collaboration and highlevel federation structure for the FIRE Facility, July 2009

The working group on modular federation of experimental test-bed facilities has been set up to derive an outline of common principles for a collaboration and high level federation architecture for the evolving facility prototypes. A federation of test-beds aims at creating a physical and logical interconnection of several independent experimental facilities or testbeds to provide a larger-scale, more diverse and higher performance platform for accomplishing tests and experiments. A collaboration/federation framework is not the same thing as having rigid control of all aspects. On the contrary, the aim is to have flexibility and individualism for the components/projects. In that sense, high level federation does not at all mean to agree on the same control plane, but only to allow resource sharing and collaboration towards establishing a sustainable customer-friendly facility. It is important to maintain the major goal of individual test-bed projects, which is to create innovative solutions for testing and to support their community of experimenters, but projects should also contribute to the common goal of collaboration and federation of experimental facilities.
This work was initiated by the Commission and funded through the FIREWORKS support action.
A simplified statement of the goal is to create an architectural structure that will allow the creation of a collaboration structure for new projects, and for existing ones. Indeed, experimental facilities research under FP7 has already been engaged, with several projects targeting various objectives. Due to the bottom-up approach, there is a need for further coordination. Another objective is to define an overview of the already evolving facilities and tools for future internet research and development and to highlight potential gaps.
The members of the working group have studied the main FIRE projects. In order to provide a framework that could fit the current project portfolio, evolve towards more collaboration in the future, allow independent work by the projects and make visible the gaps in the future experimental facilities for the future Internet research a map of FIRE facilities has been created to support future work.
The major goal of test-bed federation is to enable experiments on Future Internet research that are otherwise not possible, and this in a cost efficient and experimenter friendly way. The overall results for federated test-beds should also ensure interoperability, transparency and neutrality of the basic infrastructures. The federation/collaboration should also be considered at the dissemination level, having the requirements to exchange, compare and draw conclusions from research results. Effort should not be duplicated, and at the same time the complexity of the system shall be manageable. To achieve this, standards and transparency are essential. New participants should be encouraged to join the FIRE effort with new testbeds. Promoting the use of the FIRE federated test-bed facilities to existing and new research projects is also required. This report provides some suggestions and recommendations as to how FIRE could be oriented in order to progress towards such objectives.