The Pan-European laboratory is based on the concept of federation of distributed test laboratories and testbeds that are interconnected and provide access to required platforms, networks and services for broad interoperability testing. The coordination of resources and access to the laboratory services will be controlled by a centralised entity.

The Pan-European laboratory is a concept that is being introduced to enable the trial and evaluation of service concepts, technologies, system solutions and business models to the point where the risks associated with launching them as commercial products will be minimised. The accomplishment of this objective, which will assist many different European collaborative projects, is an important step towards the establishment of a truly pan-European collaboration network.

Panlab is a Specific Support Action (SSA) of the European Union's 6th Framework programme, Thematic Priority 2 (IST – Information Society Technologies).

It was submitted to the fifth call of the programme and addresses the strategic objective “Research networking testbeds”.

The project is partly funded by the European Commission and is running from June 2006 to May 2008.

Challenges

Panlab is a Specific Support Action which enables and facilitates the establishment of the Pan-European laboratory for next generation networks and services. The objective of Panlab is to define a framework for the interconnection of independent testbeds and laboratories. The framework includes general legal and operational mechanisms as well as the approach for the technical infrastructure.

The project distils a “Common Technology Vision” for the ICT industry and landscape by assessing major international research programmes. It identifies the long-term milestones related to testing that need to be set on the ICT industry agenda and guidance on how to best reach them. This roadmap describes the long-term requirements for the operation of the Pan-European laboratory.

The indications and propositions of the common technology vision might also serve as a generic input for European collaborative projects regardless of the framework in which they are embedded. In particular it targets relevant projects in the European Framework programmes (e.g. FP6, FP7) as well as the Eureka cluster programmes, such as CELTIC. Although Panlab has a European focus, the project is open for international collaborations notably with North American and Asian organisations.

Panlab relies on the existing and future testing facilities, and will present enhanced collaboration mechanisms between these. The federative approach to distributed testing has the benefit of flexibility, but at the cost of the management of the distributed environment. The issues addressed by Panlab range from logistics, availability of qualified personnel, remote access and management of systems to the legal, economic and operational terms, which need to be clearly defined in order to allow for interconnection and efficient testing in competitive testing environments.

The results will enable the implementation of a physical infrastructure (interconnecting facilities, remote access and management capabilities, collaboration tools, etc.), aiming at establishing integration, testing, validation/verification, and possibly certification services for specific technologies and services as well as global solution prototypes developed by European collaborative projects.

The framework will be verified on a few example cases of advanced technologies and services, specifically roaming aspects of IMS, the Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem, and the mobile TV standard DVB-H. However, Panlab is not limited to specific technologies, but is flexible concerning the subject, scope, and scale of testing.

The ultimate goal of Panlab is the establishment of the grounds for a future operational and longterm self-sustainable Pan-European laboratory. This includes a business model on the continuation of Panlab as an independent entity, targeting customers, such as European or national collaborative projects and the industry, during its pre-competitive research and development phase.