Test beds for the Networks & Communications community: an untapped potential

• Monday, 23 June 2014, 09:00-12:50, Room Marconi 1

• Organizers:

  • Federico Alvarez (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)

Workshop Description

Organisations involved in Networking & Communications Research and Innovation field are often in need of testing the results of their collaborative or internal R&D efforts. Such tests involve very often the set-up of a dedicated test bed. In the case of a collaborative project involving several partners, a test environment is built up in a lab from scratch and often dedicated only to the project itself; it typically has a life time limited to the duration of the project and then it is disbanded. In the case of in-house development, SMEs, mid-sized companies and research institutions often do not have the means to build such test beds beyond the border of their labs, preventing them from testing their product, service and/or applications on a larger scale. As a matter of fact, nowadays, even large companies are fighting to find or set up the proper environment for field trials at a reasonable cost.

The Future Internet PPP has developed in the past three years enabling the development of a broadly available set of technologies targeting SMEs and web entrepreneurs and more generally the European innovation ecosystem including mid-sized and large companies, as well as research institutions (http://www.fi-ware.org/). The core idea is that these technologies shall be offered to all including Networks & Communication stakeholders, within collaborative projects or not (http://catalogue.fi-ware.org/). In particular, the FI-PPP offering is also being made available on a growing number of physical infrastructures by the XIFI project (www.fi-xifi.eu).

In addition, there are many existing test beds and infrastructures available all over Europe and beyond. The INFINITY project estimated the number of Future Internet infrastructures available in Europe only between 500 and 600[1], at European, national, regional and local level. Details of about 230 of those are available in the XiPi web repository at www.xipi.eu.

The objective of the proposed workshop is to investigate how this “untapped potential” could be used by all the stakeholders involved in the Networking & Communications research and innovation domain could make use of existing test beds. By involving key players in the FI-PPP domain and beyond the idea is to create an interactive session in which all comers to the EUCNC will be able to discover new opportunities and discuss the potential of easy-to-access and easy-to-use Future Internet test beds and resources.

Structure

09:00-10:40

Welcome and Introduction to the workshop agenda and scope, Monique Calisti (Martel, Switzerland)
Overview of the FI-PPP federation of infrastructures and the FI-Ops services from the XIFI Project, Anastasius Gavras (Eurescom, Germany)
Overview of the FIRE offer, Hans Schaeffers (Aalto University, Finland)

Panel 1 - Existing test beds and experimental infrastructures: European landscape, federation of infrastructures, services for the Networks & Communications community

Technical and functional solutions to build a community cloud for future Internet services from an Infrastructure Owner Perspective, Federico Alvarez (UPM, Spain)
Federation of Internet experimentation facilities: architecture and implementation, Thijs Walcarius (iMinds, Belgium)
The FIRE Vision for 2020: a technical and business perspective, Scott Kirkpatrick (Hebrew University, Israel)

11:10-12:50

Keynote speech – A test bed looking for users: matching the developers’ requirements, Claude Hary (Comm4Innov, France)

Panel 2 - Are existing test beds relevant to industry, SMEs, research institutions? In which context are they useful, collaborative projects such as H2020/5G PPP, and/or for internal needs?

Future Internet-Lab (FI-LAB) – Hands-on experimentation for the Networks & Communication stakeholders, Stefano de Panfilis (Engineering, Spain)
Technical and functional solutions to build a community cloud for future Internet services from End-User Perspective, Federico Facca (Create-Net, Italy)
Inter-domain Monitoring and Software-Defined Network Connectivity for Federated Infrastructures Management, Jose Gonzalez, Federico Alvarez (UPM, Spain), Luis M. Contreras, Oscar Gonzalez (TID, Spain)
Productivity gains and boost of future Internet services in the Networks & Communication sector through large-scale experimentation, Brian Pickering (IT Innovation, UK)

Conclusions and invitation to the exhibition booths of the various projects, Dr. Monique Calisti (Martel, Switzerland)