SFI2 context & background

SFI2 project context and background

Aware of the need to evolve towards new network infrastructure demands, the scientific community has developed research on the Future Internet. In Future Internet, network infrastructures for experimentation (testbeds) supporting new technologies are added to the academic Internet in a controlled manner, with mechanisms of isolation (from traditional Internet traffic) and monitoring (for the collection of associated metrics). This allows the assessment of the impact of these new technologies on the current Internet and the experimentation of new disruptive protocols and architectures.

There are currently several infrastructures for experimentation in Brazil linked to SDN concepts, NFV, cloud computing, and 5G. These installations result from several projects carried out, mostly, from collaborations between research institutions in Brazil and Europe, through coordinated calls, and by funding agencies. Among these, the projects FIBER (FIBRE, 2013), FIWARE (FIWARE, 2014), FUTEBOL (FUTEBOL, 2016), 5GINFIRE (5GINFIRE, 2017), NECOS (NECOS, 2018), and Cloudlab-BR (CLOUDLAB, 2018) stand out.

Each of these projects was built based on different technologies and allowed experimentation to focus on innovative architectures. From the network point of view, the FIBER (Future Internet BRazilian Environment for experimentation) project focuses on experimenting with alternatives to the current Internet architecture. In contrast, the FUTEBOL project (Federated Union of Telecommunications research facilities for an EU-Brazil Open Laboratory) focuses on experimentation in telecommunications networks involving optical and wireless communications. CloudNEXT (Cloud Computing EXperimental Testbed), part of the CloudLab-BR project, focuses on the experiment in cloud computing and bare-metal provisioning, where it is possible to make exclusive use of computational hardware. In FIWARE, the focus is on the applications for Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data and deployed in a cloud. The 5GINFIRE project (Evolving FIRE into a 5G-Oriented Experimental Playground for Vertical Industries), in turn, seeks to allow the experimentation of networks oriented to a 5G architecture, based on NFV, deployed in the cloud and oriented to different application domains, such as health and safety in cities. Finally, the NECOS project (Novel Enablers for Cloud Slicing) aims to create a slice that encompasses different clouds to create a “slice” of the network with distributed resources.

Despite the variety of these projects' resources, the networks and applications that will be based on new Internet architectures demand a scenario containing the sum of all these individualized resources. In this way, these experimental environments need to be integrated to allow the end-to-end development of innovative and disruptive applications, protocols, and architectures for the Internet.

Another point is that many of these applications require specialized end-to-end configurations of resources, going beyond the Internet's best-effort model (where all traffic flows are treated equally). Although traffic can suffer different treatment in some networks, this treatment is done in specific Internet sections, not extending from source to destination (end-to-end). Thus, it is crucial to create automated "slices" of the Internet with specialized configurations for each of these new applications in addition to integrating resources.