FLEX

FLEX (FIRE LTE testbeds for open experimentation) aims at contributing a crucial missing piece in FIRE's infrastructure puzzle: cellular access technologies and Long-Term Evolution (LTE). FLEX's experimentation environment will feature both open source platforms and configurable commercial equipment that span macro-cell, pico-cell and small-cell setups. FLEX will build upon current FIRE testbed management and experiment control tools and extend them to provide support for the new LTE components, and will develop specialized monitoring tools and methodologies. Focus will be placed on mobility, with the establishment of both real and emulated mobility functionalities on the testbeds. FLEX will organize two open calls, aiming to attract research groups to conduct sophisticated experiments, test innovative usages or provide functional extensions of LTE testbeds.

How does it work

FLEX will establish LTE resources by means of access and core network in existing FIRE facilities thus reducing the integration effort. The LTE resources deployment will take place at the wireless testbeds of NITOS in Greece, w—iLab.t in Belgium and EURECOM in France by using two different setups; The first one based on commercial equipment and the second one using highly configurable Open Source LTE components on an FPGA setup. The first approach offers a commercial network that is configurable and enables testing that needs compliance with the market products while the second one allows for full redesign of the system. The state-of-the-art tools for resource control and experiment orchestration and monitoring will be extended in order to support the LTE specific resources, so as to provide a user friendly way for the experimenter to remotely access the testbeds and evaluate new ideas and protocols.

Project's website: www.flex-project.eu

SmartFIRE

The SMARTFIRE project is comprised of 10 partners in total from EU (Greece, France, Spain and Belgium), South Korea and an international collaborator from Australia. The project aims to further develop EU-South Korea cooperation on Future Internet experimental research. The project will eventually deliver a shared experimental facility spanning different islands located in Europe (EU) and South Korea (KR). This large scaled facility will promote joint experimentation among EU and KR experimenters, encouraging them to conceive and implement innovative protocols, able to take advantage of the current leading network technologies. SMARTFIRE targets at creating a common and unified way of experimenting with a large-scale facility, enabling distributed applications by incorporating cutting edge SDN research that is primarily conducted by the South Korean Partners, and wireless networking experimentation that is carried out by the European Partners. The project will further promote SDN related research, such as Information Centric Networking, and exploit the OpenFlow technology as the core network and wireless techologies for the access network segments. During its two year duration, the separate EU and KR islands will be federated and operated in a common and scalable way, thus establishing a unique intercontinental experimental facility. The testbed islands will be harmonized in the way they are controlled and managed.  Two use cases will be used to evaluate the facility, one inspired from the emerging IoT research field and one concerning Video Streaming applications over heterogeneous networks. Finally, we expect that SMARTFIRE will bridge the gap between Future Internet research conducted at KR and EU sites and introduce a common way of developing extensions for existing testbed facilities.

Project's website: http://eukorea-fire.eu/

Stamina

STAMINA will leverage statistical physics inspired methods to deliver a novel foundational framework for managing complexity in information network mega-structures and for efficientlly solving large-scale network optimization problems that are intractable by classical methods. Recent success stories like the effective decoding of LDPC codes in information theory support the great promise of the approach A cross-disciplinary work plan is proposed, at the interface of statistical physics, networking and computer science. A network optimization problem with given objective over a space of possible configurations is mapped to a statistical physics problem instance with probability distribution over possible configurations. Solving the optimization problem is equivalent to finding minimum energy configurations where probability distribution concentrates.

Statistical mechanics theories from spin glass and disordered systems will establish fundamental connections among atomic micro-interactions, emergent network behaviour and phase transitions. Belief propagation message passing methods will be harnessed, that disassemble the hard centralized combinatorial problem to iterative lightweight local messaging, thus achieving autonomic network control at no cost for solution dissemination, and promoting green computing through ultra-low processing load. Flexibility and simplicity enable real-time adaptation at different time scales of variations through online construction of solutions.

Three challenging case studies (energy-prudent control at device and network level, resource management regimes for optimal transport capacity and latency, and inference of hidden network states) serve as proof-of-concept for enabling novel, currently suppressed functionalities. A solid validation plan is laid, with large-scale simulation and test-bed experimentation. Notable achievements of members of our team make us optimistic about the potential of the methods and motivate our research agenda.

Project's website: http://stamina-ict.eu/