Building Intelligent Future Internet Infrastructures: FELIX for Federating Software-Defined Networking Experimental Networks in Europe and Japan

Future Internet (FI) test beds are experimentation platforms comprising different types of resources and located in various geographical locations. The ability to leverage heterogeneous resources across these infrastructures is a key concept in the creation of future intelligent network technologies, which are important for cyberphysical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and many other large-scale systems. This is generally achieved with programmable networks that are based on software-defined networking (SDN) principles [1]. SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane, thereby increasing the flexibility in the underlying network control and management. Both academic and industrial SDN researchers are carrying out substantial research and development on the FI worldwide using these large-scale test-bed infrastructures [2]. These efforts focus on the integration of networks, compute, and other resources using increasingly intelligent solutions. This federation of network islands results in a software-defined infrastructure (SDI) that mimics the real-world environment for testing large-scale, innovative network applications, algorithms, protocols, or network functions. Researchers use common interfaces and workflows in a federation, which abstracts different internal infrastructures, resources, and procedures to facilitate the execution of experiments. However, a federation of open, heterogeneous test beds is nontrivial and requires an appropriately intelligent architecture and framework.