Describing the Essential Ingredients for an Open, General-Purpose, Shared and Both Large-Scale and Sustainable Experimental Facility (OpenLab)

OpenLab was an instrumental project, delivering OneLab, the first heterogeneous federation of testbeds open for services on August 2015 and having served hundreds of users since. OpenLab brought together the essential ingredients for an open, general purpose, and sustainable large-scale shared Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) Facility, by advancing early prototypes of this Facility. Its main goal was to advance the community by pushing the envelope of a more mature facility, targeting user interface, control and experimentation planes for highly heterogeneous testbeds as well as monitoring and first line support tools. It brought together the most experienced experts and teams in a 3 years project. The early prototypes, coming from former FIRE initiatives OneLab and Panlab, as well as other valuable sources, included a set of demonstrably successful testbeds: PlanetLab Europe, with its 150 partner/user institutions across Europe; the NITOS and w-iLab.t wireless testbeds; two IMS telco testbeds for exploring merged media distribution; the GSN green networking testbed; the ETOMIC high precision network measurement testbed; and the HEN emulation testbed. Associated with these testbeds were similarly successful control-and experimental-plane software. OpenLab advanced these prototypes with key enhancements in the areas of mobility, wireless, monitoring, domain interconnections, and the integration of new technologies such as OpenFlow. These enhancements are transparent to existing users of each testbed, while opening up a diversity of new experiments that users can perform, from wired and wireless media distribution to distributed and autonomous management of new social interactions and localized services, going far beyond what can be tested on the current Internet. OpenLab‘s interoperability work brought FIRE closer to the goal of a unified Facility and provided models that were promoted to the Future Internet PPP. Finally, the project, through two open calls, supported users in industry and academia, notably those in FP7 Future Internet projects, who proposed innovative experiments using the OpenLab technologies and testbeds. Besides supporting users with a single portal and authentication mechanism, providing a direct access to their preferred testbeds, It opened an avenue for radically new needs covering the so-called verticals (smart cities, industrial Internet, transporta- tion, environement, e-Health where several heterogeneous technologies have to be combined in a single experiment. This is a unique feature that is brought to the experimenters by OpenLab/OneLab.