PII 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 (tele-)communications 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 automatically 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 in FP6. 20 partners constitute a highly competent, well-balanced consortium of SMEs, associations, academic institutions as well as large manufacturers and network operators, to mobilise the critical mass at European level to achieve the project objectives.