The main goal of the FIBRE project is the design, implementation and validation of a shared Future Internet research facility, supporting the joint experimentation of European and Brazilian researchers. FIBRE is a coordinated project, unifying under the same umbrella the efforts done in the FIBRE-EU and FIBRE-BR projects.

Mantychore will follow the Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) paradigm to enable National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and other e-Infrastructure providers to enhance their service portfolio by building and deploying software and tools to provide infrastructure resources like routers, switches, optical devices, and IP networks as a service to virtual research communities.

RAISME enables high-tech organisations with niche skills to rapidly build and scale innovative ICT applications. This is achieved through the collaborative use of advanced “mashup” technology and cloud computing. The RAISME SMEs are at the vanguard of a new business paradigm where the end-user becomes part of the product development lifecycle, thus accelerating it, and where collaboration allows faster exploitation of knowledge and productivity. Initial RAISME partners who have already developed state-of-the-art visualisation, optimisation and integration tools that will be able boot-strap a series of new applications and then deliver highly innovative knowledge services to the market.

The aim of the OFELIA project is to create a unique experimental facility that allows researchers to not only experiment ‘on’ a test network but to control the network itself precisely and dynamically. To achieve this, the OFELIA facility is based on OpenFlow, a currently emerging networking technology that allows to virtualize and control the network environment through secure and standardized interfaces. In a nutshell, OpenFlow enables experimenters to change the behavior of the network as part of the experiment rather than, if at all, as part of the experiment setup. OFELIA will provide high-performance OpenFlow equipment to enable experiments at scale and to ensure that the facility is based on mature technology.

RINA -Recursive InterNetwork Architecture-, developed by the Internet pioneer John Day in his book ‘Patterns in Network Architecture’, provides a general theory about networking. This theory clarifies what is really the layered structure of networking protocols: there is only a single type of layer, which is configurable, and this layer can be repeated as many times as required to optimally solve the network resource allocation problem. This model opens the door to multiple parallel Internets (not only the single, global, flat network that today’s Internet is), provides a structure that inherently supports multi-homing, mobility and multicast without the need for special protocols, is more secure, and allows distributed applications to use the network to communicate without having to know network internal details such as the addressing. In this project the network technologies cluster collaborates with the Irish research centre TSSG, the Boston University and the American startup TRIA Network Systems to develop the first RINA prototype.

NOVI (Networking innovations Over Virtualized Infrastructures) research concentrates on efficient approaches to compose virtualized e-Infrastructures towards a holistic Future Internet (FI) cloud service. Resources belonging to various levels, i.e. networking, storage and processing are in principle managed by separate yet interworking providers. NOVI will concentrate on methods, information systems and algorithms that will enable users with composite isolated slices, baskets of resources and services provided by federated infrastructures.

  BONFIRE will design, build an operate a multi-site Cloud prototype FIRE facility to support research across applications, services and systems at all stages of the R&D lifecycle, targeting the services research community on Future Internet. The BONFIRE vision is to give researchers in these areas access to a facility that supports large scale multy-disciplinary experimentation on their systems and applications addressing all aspects of researchs across all layers. Our overall goal is to encourage new communities of experimenters to take advantadge of the opportunities offered by the FIRE infrastructure to guide the development of the Future Internet from a service-based applications standpoint.

GEYSERS’s vision is to qualify optical infrastructure providers and network operators with a new architecture, to enhance their traditional business operations. Optical network infrastructure providers will compose logical infrastructures and rent them out to network operators; network operators will run cost-efficient, dynamic and mission-specific networks by means of integrated control and management techniques. GEYSERS’s concept is that high-end IT resources at users’ premises are fully integrated with the network services procedures, both at the infrastructure-planning and connection-provisioning phases. Following this vision, GEYSERS will specify and implement a novel optical-network architecture able to support ‘Optical Network + Any-IT’ resource provisioning seamlessly and efficiently. Energy-consumption metrics for the end-to-end service routing are part of this efficiency.

This project will tackle the Future of Internet from both a revolutionary and evolutionary perspective, in order to understand the benefits and disadvantages of each approach and be able to compare them. Additionally, the project will take into account solutions thought to improve three important lacks of the current Internet: energy efficiency, heterogeneity of information and coexistence of networks. In order to do so, two technologies have been identified as potential solutions to some of these problems: i) Media Independence and ii) Virtualization. On the one hand, Media Independence enables the decoupling of physical and overlay infrastructure by introducing an abstraction layer between link and network layers. On the other hand Virtualization enables the creation of overlay networks spanning multiple technologies and realms, hence being a very useful tool for context-aware service composition.

The objective of this proposal is the creation of a leading edge network supporting a much enhanced range of services, both network and added value services, targeted at end-users across the GÉANT service area. A principal goal will be to create a portfolio of seamless multi domain services. In contrast to GN2, its predecessor project, much more emphasis is placed on service development and service introduction.