FIRE related initiatives in Member States and internationally

FIRE is among the largest initiatives in Europe and worldwide for building an experimental facility for Future Internet research. After its preparatory phase and the launch of the first wave of FIRE projects nearly a year ago, FIRE has established itself on eye-level with other initiatives, whose prototypes of experimental facilities are at a similar stage and maturity. FIRE's unique features as compared to other initiatives and projects around the world are:

• The close link between the FIRE Facility and the FIRE Research, which pushes the limits and defines the challenges for the FIRE Facility through visionary, multidisciplinary research.
• The positioning of the FIRE Facility as an infrastructure for Future Internet research in the broadest sense considering the Internet as a complex system and therefore addressing all the associated aspects of the Internet in a holistic vision, and at all relevant levels and layers including network architectures and technologies, service architectures and platforms, networked media and trustworthy infrastructures.
• The broad scope of FIRE ranging from proof-of-concept testbeds primarily addressing the longer term research community to pre-commercial testbeds addressing experimentation closer to the market and being of particular interest for industrial players.

Within FIRE a discussion has started on how to collaborate and whether to eventually federate the different facility prototypes in order to broaden the scope, scale and diversity of the resources offered to the industrial and academic research community. This effort of collaboration and federation cannot stop at the boundaries of FIRE. Instead, mechanisms need to be found to include national resources of the EU Member States and Associated Countries. Discussions are on-going with the most-advanced and relevant national initiatives in order to better explore synergies and potential for cooperation at different levels. It must be recognized though, that the objectives of a federation of national resources are unlikely to be realized in a single form of federation since they can or are contradicting and are therefore hard to align (common objectives are a cornerstone of ANY federation). Hence, at least as a starting point, the establishment of different federations must be considered between facilities with at least some shared common objectives. As the Future Internet is a global issue, collaboration on an international scale is a must. First collaboration and federation between initiatives and projects on the EU side and in the US, Japan, and Korea has started. In Europe, during the Future Internet Assembly, the FIRE launch, and the FIRE Expert Group Meetings, a dialogue with many Member States Future Internet initiatives and projects has started. Future Internet initiatives in several other Member States and Associated Countries have a strong focus on experimentation. Here only an incomplete list of some highlights can be included:

• The Belgian project ilab.t of IBBT supports experimental multidisciplinary research for FI technologies and innovative ICT services and applications by industry and academia. Among others they focus on wireless technologies, and a "virtual wall". Ilab.t is part of ECODE and is collaborating with their IBBT Living Lab towards bringing end-users into the experiment.
• French project ALADDIN-Grid’5000 is an initiative aiming at developing a highly reconfigurable, controllable and monitorable experimental large-scale distributed platform. Although, its design targets experiments in the area of Grids, its high degree of reconfigurability makes it suitable to carry out experiments in the area of service infrastructures, cloud computing and the Internet of Servers. Due to their complementarities, ALADDIN-Grid’5000 and Onelab2 are considering federation of both facilities driven by a common use case. Such a vertical federation would allow experimentation across many layers of the internet in an integrated fashion, thereby bringing together the networking and the services research communities.
• German initiative G-Lab consists of a research and experimental facility used to investigate the interplay between new technologies and the requirements of emerging applications for the Future Internet. G-Lab partners develop a secure and reliable platform for applications and services with special emphasis on new mechanisms for routing, addressing, etc., and their investigation with regard to practical feasibility, scalability, and performance in realistic environments. In their second phase G-Lab plans to intensify its collaboration with industry at the relevant levels of the value chain. G-Lab and Onelab2 are discussing a slice-based federation federation for testing on larger scale, testing algorithms in a heterogeneous environment, testing beyond one Tier, testing under more realistic conditions, and for extending the geographic distance between the sites (for example to get longer delays).
• In Italy, the National Research Council (CNR) features several large-scale projects on Future Internet topics ranging from integration of enabling technologies to management of multimedia content, from global security and public safety to grid services and cloud computing, personalised smart data mining and knowledge extraction techniques. Discussions are ongoing about how to exploit synergies among these initiatives and the EU Future Internet activities. The National Research and Education Network (GARR) coordinated the FEDERICA project and may act as a facilitator.
• RedIRIS, the Spanish academic and research network, actively participates in the FEDERICA project, on aspects like user groups, network infrastructure design, authentication and authorisation, and new resource management models. Spanish funded project Project PASITO (Telecommunications Service Analysis Platform) aims at the deployment of an experimentation platform for new Internet services and protocols as well as the provisioning of an Open platform in which other academic and research centre research groups and, occasionally, operators and manufacturers, collaborate.
• The Finnish ICT SHOK initiative has a strong focus on wireless technologies and on user-driven open innovation bringing the user into the loop through experimentation at all stages of the technology development and adoption cycle. Finnish partners are bringing this experience to a European scale through their strong involvement in FIRE project PII.
• In Sweden several national projects with a strong experimentation dimension are supported, most of them having a strong application dimension like IPTV, interactive TV, user behavior services, just to name some. Projects often involve industrial and societal players at all levels of the value chain, some of them bringing users into the experiment at a broad scale.
• In the Netherlands, testbeds focus on wide-area distributed systems, lambda networking as well as photonics-based Grids for very high quality digital media.
• In Hungary, experimentation is driven by the national research network, which provides experimentation resources. Driven by realistic use-cases, Hungarian organizations are investigating and plan to pilot a potential federation between projects Federica and Onelab2.

Outside Europe, the US and Japan are most active in Future Internet research and in the provisioning of experimental facilities, here just some highlights:

• In its first spiral, the US-GENI initiative supports five to some extent complementary clusters of projects each of them being built on a different control plane, targeting different research user communities, and starting from existing infrastructures:
• Planetlab (targeted at distributed systems and networking community),
• ProtoGENI/Emulab (Internet2 backbone, programmable edge clusters); ORBIT/Winlab
• (targeted at the wireless research communities), and
• ORCA (including compute resource, service-oriented, no baseline project).
• ORBIT Management Framework (OMF).
• Led by NSF and the EC, FIRE and GENI regularly organise joint workshops (Dec 2008 in Madrid, July 2009 in Seattle) for bringing key researchers together and exploiting synergies. Due to its common origins in Planetlab, FIRE project Onelab2 is closely collaborating with GENI-Planetlab. Through managing Planetlab Europe, Onelab2 is part of a worldwide federation with Planetlab US (PLC) and Planetlab Japan. Onelab2 is bringing new innovative dimensions into Planetlab, e.g. related to wireless and to autonomic communication. FIRE project PII has recently started to collaborate with GENI-ORCA. Both projects develop a universal brokering tool for testbed services based on similar principles. The projects are complementary with ORCA being strong on addressing the higher level services dimension and with PII addressing industrial aspects and precommercial testbeds. Belgian project ilab.t is collaborating with GENI-EMULAB. Federica is working closely with the Internet2 consortium.
• The Japanese Future Internet research landscape is based on two concepts: Next Generation Network (NXGN) and New Generation Network (NWGN), the latter using new paradigms and architectures, with a view to replacing the current IP. For the moment, the AKARI Architecture project works on the design of the future network, supported by the experimental network project JGN2 (Japan Gigabit Network 2) and its successor JGN2plus. Besides at more general EUJapanese for a on ICT research, the Japanese and the European Future Internet research communities meet regularly (June 2008 in Brussels, July 2009 in Tokyo) to inform each other, to exchange views, and to start or deepen collaboration. On both sides there are similar long term goals in redesigning the Internet. Related to experimentation, EU-Japan collaboration has led to the “decentralisation of PlanetLab” towards a federation of Planetlab US (PLC), Planetlab Europe
  (operated by Onelab2) and Planetlab Japan
• During the OECD Conference and the Korean-EU bilateral meeting in Seoul in June 2008 and a bilateral event between Korea and the EU in November 2008 in Brussels, representatives of the FIRE community met with the Korean Future Internet research and experimentation community. In addition there are close contacts between FIRE partners and organisations in Canada (related to their 0-carbon initiative) and Australia (Onelab2 has an Australian partner who is also part in USGENI Orbit). First more informal discussions have started as well with Brazil and China.