GÉANT world testbed facility: Federated and distributed testbeds as a service facility of GÉANT

Abstract

Global network innovation requires large-scale distributed test facilities that are similar to the typically multidomain real-world environments in order to ensure the agile adaptation of new concepts, architectures, technologies and protocols from prototyping through testing into production. Virtualization, in general, allows network researchers to create insulated autonomous slices of production environments that have the required scale and at the same time provide a safe and secure playground to carry out disruptive research by simultaneous user groups without affecting each other's experiments. The GÉANT World Testbed Facility is leveraging a distributed infrastructure with well-defined domain boundaries and federated authentication, authorization and access control on the underlying resources. The highly programmable nature of the facility allows researchers to create a complex hierarchy of atomic resources and composite testbeds consisting of computing, storage and dynamic networking elements instantiated on demand.