Research & Development

While many researchers around the globe currently investigate disruptive or so-called “clean slate” approaches for the Future Internet (FI), the TUB AV research group is dedicated to evolutionary Future Internet development. FI research is a global issue which becomes evident by the number of FI projects and initiatives that are currently under way, such as the FIND and GENI initiatives in US, the FIRE initiative in Europe, the Asia Future Internet Forum in Asia, and all the projects related to those initiatives. 

From our perspective, evolutionary FI research builds upon solutions and technologies that exist today and investigates the influence and impact of new (potentially disruptive) approaches to solve current problems and create new solutions for the converging Internet and Communications domain. Very much in line with the approach of the Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) program, currently one of Europe’s biggest flagship FI programs, we believe that by utilizing, enhancing and integrating IT and telecommunication technologies, the future of the Internet evolves right now. Similar to the FI-PPP we believe that by integrating and enhancing network and service platforms and by exposing generic services to various usage areas the future internet of things and internet of services can already be realized. This allows a broad range of smart applications (e.g. smart transport, mobility, healthcare, energy, safety etc.) to be easily deployed and executed on top of unified, federated platforms, which already provide commonly required core mechanisms and generic services, providing these functions and services via standardized application programming interfaces (APIs).

An example of this approach is the G-Lab Deep project where TUB AV is investigating a cross-layer composition concept and technology solution. Another example for our evolutionary FI research methodology is the FIRE projects PII, OpenLab and Fed4FIRE where large scale experimental facilities are established. These facilities can be used to execute large scale experiments to investigate evolutionary FI concepts and implementations. TUB AV is building an extensible and distributed open source experimentation and management framework for federated Future Internet facilities called FITeagle.

With the upcoming European FP7 projects which shall target the service layer and enable service layer experiments, TUB AV will further participate in defining evolutionary FI concepts. Our vision is the seamless integration and mapping of cross layer functionalities as well as policy-based service brokerage for the Internet of Service to become a reality. Adaptive and open resource federations and open platforms that allow the usage of resources across the boundaries of administrative domains are well-recognized enablers to achieve this vision. 

Also, in the future activities around the FI PPP, TUB AV potions itself as research unit driven by evolutionary FI research and will actively contribute in the areas of next generation mobile networks, resource and data federations, the Internet of Services, as well as large scale FI testbeds to support a core research platform for the benefit of industry and academia, and our information society in general.

Based on our long term expertise and our developments of Next Generation Network (NGN) infrastructures and services (including IMS, EPC, M2M and SDP) we actively and extensively contribute to the evolution of the FI (including the FI-PPP core platform and usage areas), thus fostering the evolution of NGNs towards the FI (NGN2FI), for more information visit our NGN2FI Evolution Lab.