About FOKUS

The Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS (Research Center for Open Communication Systems) in Germany is an independent research organization performing since more than 20 years with 220 international scientists applied research in the converging fields of Internet, telecommunications, entertainment and information technologies. In this regard, FOKUS is undertaking many industry sponsored research and development projects, mainly performing the prototyping and evaluation of new concepts, architectures and protocols related to Next Generation Networks and the emerging Future Internet.

State of the art technology testbeds are forming for many of these projects the enabling infrastructure. After launching the first SIP testbed iptel.org in 2002, the Open OSA/Parlay Playground in 2003, the Open IMS Playground in 2004, FOKUS has opened in 2006 the Open SOA Telco Playground, focusing on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based rich communication service implementations within emerging Next Generation Networks, and the Media Interoperability Lab, addressing rich media service implementations on top of IP infrastructures. An additional Future Internet testbed launched in 2007 provides the basis for many projects performed under the banner of the European FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) initiative. The recently launched Future Seamless Communication FUSECO Playground is a pioneering reference testbed, integrating various state of the art wireless broadband networks into a 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) prototype platform, allowing the rapid validation of new networking paradigms, and prototyping of innovative Future Internet and smart city applications.