Future Internet and Next Generation Testbed Federation

Federation in the context of sharing network resources and services is a model for the establishment of a large scale and diverse infrastructure for communication technologies, services, and applications. It can generally be seen as an interconnection of two or more independent administrative domains for the creation of a richer environment and for the increased multilateral benefits of the users of the individual domains.

Testbed and experimental facility federation is currently driving a number of research activities, as combining infrastructural resources and services of more than one independently controlled domain, enhances the utility of testbeds significantly. This is true for the following reasons:

• Access can be given to more resources, increasing the scale of experiments.
• Specific testbeds may include unique infrastructural resources or configuration properties that allow experimenters to execute new kinds of experiments.
• Sharing resources increases the average utilization of testing and experimentation equipment.
• Combining testbed resources can promote collaboration and scientific gain between different communities (e.g. Internet community and Telco community) and research groups.

We have designed a network domain federation architecture that is currently implemented and installed across Europe as part of the work conducted by the PII project.

Experimental Facility Resource Federation

The central federation control center is called Teagle. Teagle allows federation users to:

• Find available resources by browsing a registry
• Add their own resources (this requires compliance to some federation processes)
• Select resources and combine them to design custom testbeds
• Configure resources as part of a custom testbed
• Request resource reservation and deployment of a custom testbed

By means of gateways and resource adaptors we can support highly heterogeneous resources across layers and regionally distributed domains ranging from virtualized server machines to advanced software frameworks.

For more information please contact:

Sebastian Wahle: sebastian [dot] wahle [at] fokus [dot] fraunhofer [dot] de