Future Internet Lab

What will the Internet look like in 15 years? This central question is what guides researchers of the Future Internet Lab at the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS. Public debate on the development of the Internet nowadays focuses more on the content-related side. Technical aspects such as performance, scalability, reliability and security on a network level are usually secondary. Our team develops concepts for future networks with concrete solutions for these important challenges of the Internet evolution. These networks are able to administer themselves, offer users more security by means of self-protection mechanisms and warrant extensive support functions for end-systems and applications.

The teams "Network Research", "Next Generation Network Infrastructures", "Modelling and Testing for System and Service Solutions" and "Future Application and Media", united in the Fraunhofer FOKUS FI-Lab, provide an efficient environment in which various evolutionary and revolutionary approaches for the Internet of the future are being researched. Through this, scientists and developers of new technologies have the opportunity to conduct tests and simulations under realistic conditions with regards to network size, heterogeneity and structure.

Virtualisation software and a uniform solution for device management allow the flexible establishment of test scenarios and experiments.

The Future Internet Lab collaborates with numerous international partners and other FOKUS-internal test beds, and cooperates strongly with the department “Architecture of Switching Nodes” at the faculty of “Electrical Engineering and Informatics” at the Technical University of Berlin.

The Future Internet team at the Fraunhofer FOKUS provides a catalogue of tools and methods that make the evaluation of FI-technologies from various aspects possible.