The FEDERICA project is creating an experimental testbed that provides a high level of reliablity and quality. Network researchers from various disciplines and research groups do not need to be connected physically, but can access their ‘slice’ from anywhere on the Internet.
An official launch event on Monday 24 November in Lyon, France, featured presentations and demonstrations that highlighted progress made since the project began in January this year. While FEDERICA is only a third of the way through its 30 month lifespan, the project team has succeeded in defining a network architecture and the configuration of PoPs (points of presence) on its substrate, and is on the point of opening the network to users experimenting on the Future Internet.
Users may include network researchers from a range of disciplines across academia and also private sector and European projects. Their research has to not only use the network as a tool, but primarily as the subject of their work, experimenting on new Internet architectures and protocols. The virtual resources at their disposal will allow them to conduct potentially disruptive experiments without any adverse effect on existing production networks.
The FEDERICA infrastructure allows multiple research groups to trial new ideas in parallel and on the same physical resources. Each group receives an infrastructure ‘slice’ containing the virtual resources and topology requested.
To ensure optimal and fair technical use, access is granted through a User Policy Board.
The FEDERICA infrastructure is today offering its core resources in four points of presence, in the Czech Republic (CESNET), Germany (DFN), Italy (GARR) and Poland (PSNC). It is connected by Gigabit per second circuits provided by GÉANT2 and national networks, with high performance Ethernet services routers provided by Juniper Networks, Inc. The infrastructure will be extended in the coming months to include nine additional PoPs in Europe, hosted by project partners.
The project depends on global cooperation between researchers, vendors, national research and education networks (NRENs) and GÉANT2, the high bandwidth, pan-European research and education network.
Next Goals:
The second phase of the project will implement a 'tool-bench' that will integrate these mechanisms in order to support more automated on-demand allocation of ‘slices’ to researchers. The tool-bench will ultimately enable control of resources across multiple domains, allowing the FEDERICA concept to be extended to communities beyond the European research and education sector, which is the primary target user group.
Furthermore, FEDERICA will liaise with similar infrastructure projects such as the PlanetLab overlay network, the PanLab II project and the USA’s National Science Foundation GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) initiative. While the initial testing phase is limited to selected users, the infrastructure will be made available to other EC projects at the end of 2008.