PII

PII - Pan European Laboratory Infrastructure Implementation

The European Union funded FIRE initiative (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) provides the research basis for the future Internet within the Framework Program 7 (FP7) and is represented by the Commission’s call for proposals on Objective 1.6 “New paradigms and experimental facilities”. Interconnected testbeds as a European federation of testbeds shall provide testing support for service architectures, infrastructures, and software platforms and pave the way for an early stage testing of new paradigms. The vision is one of a broad range of advanced and interconnected testbeds, spanning the technology chain from the network connectivity to the service architecture and the development chain from proof-of-concept to operational testbeds, which can be used by both industry and academia. By addressing future challenges for the Internet, this new experimentally-driven approach is challenging the mainstream perceptions for future Internet development.

The Integrated Project (IP) PII is the successor of the FP6 Specific Support Action (SSA) Panlab and is one of the two IPs under the FIRE call. PII started in June 2008 and addresses the need for large-scale testing facilities in the communications area by implementing an infrastructure for federating testbeds. The central objective of PII is to create a testbed federation among regional innovation clusters in Europe. This will enable companies participating in these clusters to test new communication services and applications across Europe. The testbed federation includes four core innovation clusters and three satellite clusters.

PII will develop and deploy effective mechanisms and technologies to enable a functioning federation of existing testbeds. This will provide added value to users of existing local testbeds, and it will prove that federation is a model for the establishment of a long-term sustainable, large-scale and diverse testing infrastructure for telecommunications technologies, services and applications in Europe.

In particular PII will:

• Develop mechanisms and tools to describe, store, locate and orchestrate testing services as well as means to provide composite testbeds across multiple administrative domains.
• Develop and elaborate mechanisms to combine and accommodate future clean-slate approaches and provide testing services in a network-agnostic manner.
• Define a common abstract control framework, which enables the interconnection of diverse testbeds.
• Establish trust across the federation by means of quality assurance processes and tools.
• Integrate the concept of User Driven Innovation.
• Execute a techno-socio-economic study to assess the long-term sustainability of the federation model.

PII’s testbed federation infrastructure will build on the legal, operational, and technical framework developed by the Panlab SSA. The 20 partners constitute a highly competent, well-balanced consortium of SMEs, associations, academic institutions as well as large manufacturers and network operators, who will mobilize the critical mass at European level to achieve the project objectives.

Fraunhofer FOKUS has the lead for building the central coordination platform Teagle, which will provide means for searching, describing and orchestrating services offered by a distributed European testbed infrastructure.