A new, international Open Testbed Community (OTC) emerged from an intensive workshop on federated testbeds that took place in San Francisco the week of May 3rd. This workshop was spearheaded by leaders from the IEEE SDN Initiative1 and EIT Digital2 . As we move from the era of protocols to the era of innovation in the global Information and Telecommunication ecosystem there is an opportunity to consolidate disjointed development efforts. This opportunity will leverage Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) for agile, robust, interoperability between SDN islands.

The workshop culminated in a significant intent to start an Open, Federated Testbed (OFTB) by interconnecting three existing centers of expertise based in the USA and Europe. The outcome of these efforts will be reported in the Berlin5GWeek event in November 2016. The workshop brought new collaboration and support for the IEEE SDN Initiative that is building an engineering catalog of testbeds, toolkits and software that can be rated by the technical community. They will also track testing requests to better coordinate effective use of OTC resources and prioritize testing. This nicely complement the effort of EIT Digital to expand the Federated Testbed (FTB) started in 2016 and under expansion that can be used to stimulate innovation in the area of 5G and future communications services