Contact Person
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Dr.-Ing. Florian Schreiner
Research Fellow
Business Unit NGNI
+49 30 3463-7174

The OpenLab Project

Sep. 01, 2011 to June 30, 2014

OpenLab brings together the essential ingredients for an open, general purpose and sustainable large scale shared experimental facility, providing advances to the early and successful prototypes serving the demands of Future Internet Research and Experimentation. We are deploying the software and tools that allow these advanced testbeds to support a diverse set of applications and protocols in more efficient and flexible ways.

OpenLab delivers control and experimental plane middleware to facilitate early use of our testbeds by researchers in industry and academia, exploiting our own proven technologies, developed notably in the OneLab and Panlab initiatives, as well as drawing upon other initiatives’ best work, such as the SFA control framework and OpenFlow switching. OpenLab’s contribution to that portfolio includes: PlanetLab Europe (PLE), with its over 200 partner/user institutions across Europe; the NITOS and w-iLab.t wireless testbeds; two IMS telco testbeds that can connect to the public PSTN, to IP phone services, and can explore merged media distribution; an LT3 cellular wireless testbed; the ETOMIC high precision network measurement testbed; the HEN emulation testbed; and the ns-3 simulation environment. Potential experiments that can be performed over the available infrastructure go beyond what can be tested on the current internet.

OpenLab extends the facilities with advanced capabilities in the area of mobility, wireless, monitoring, domain interconnections and introduces new technologies such as OpenFlow. These enhancements are transparent to existing users of each facility. Finally, OpenLab will finance and work with users who propose innovative experiments using its technologies and testbeds, via the open call mechanism developed for FIRE facilities.

Fraunhofer FOKUS/TU Berlin contributions

The OpenLab project merges the two major European experimental facilities initiatives PanLab and OneLab. As the only partner who contributed to both former projects FOKUS and TU Berlin will play an important role within the federation and experimental plane by bringing in and further extending their resource federation framework TEAGL and their network measurement service Packet Tracking. Within the project Fraunhofer FOKUS and TU Berlin target the facilitation of experiment setup through a generic control frontend which enables the researcher to capture the experiments metrics of interest over heterogeneous resources.