FEDERICA: Federated e-Infrastructure Dedicated to European Researchers Innovating in Computing Network Architectures

The FEDERICA project is to create a virtual network environment that is dedicated to investigate and trial novel network protocols and services, as well as Future Internet architectural concepts and emerging applications. With this purpose in mind, a technology agnostic network infrastructure that consists of transmission devices, gigabit connections, and computing resources has been created. The physical FEDERICA network footprint is mapped to the existing GÉANT network links and additional NREN connections and creates its own infrastructure on top that allows resource virtualisation. The project partners do research on novel resource virtualisation techniques as well as share their operational experiences on virtualisation capable infrastructures during the project lifetime. Within the framework of FEDERICA, close cooperation has been established with various standardization bodies such as IETF, ITU-T, OIF, and IPsphere. Although, the main objective of the project is to create a physical environment that allows obtaining dedicated virtual slices of the infrastructure configured by the users, the project also facilitates information exchange, initiates technical discussions among the experts and disseminates scientific results primarily to national research and education network community. The FEDERICA project is partly funded by the European Commission under the INFRA-2007-1.2.2 “Deployment of e-Infrastructures for Scientific Communities” call of the Seventh Framework Program. The FEDERICA project [1] has been devised to provide support and research on current and Future Internet technologies and architectures. The project is linked to the European FIRE initiative [2] and the European Future Internet Assembly [3]. Other similar initiatives exist worldwide, e.g. GENI [4] in the United States in Europe, and AKARI [5] in Japan.