Integrating a smart city testbed into a large-scale heterogeneous federation of future internet experimentation facilities: the SmartSantander approach

Abstract

For some years already, there has been a plethora of research initiatives throughout the world that have deployed diverse experimentation facilities for Future Internet technologies research and development. While access to these testbeds has been sometimes restricted to the specific research community supporting them, opening them to different communities can not only help those infrastructures to achieve a wider impact, but also to better identify new possibilities based on novel considerations brought by those external users. On top of the individual testbeds, supporting experiments that employs several of them in a combined and seamless fashion has been one of the main objectives of different transcontinental research initiatives, such as FIRE in Europe or GENI in United States. In particular, Fed4FIRE project and its continuation, Fed4FIRE+, have emerged as "best-in-town" projects to federate heterogeneous experimentation platforms. This paper presents the most relevant aspects of the integration of a large scale testbed on the IoT domain within the Fed4FIRE+ federation. It revolves around the adaptation carried out on the SmartSantander smart city testbed. Additionally, the paper offers an overview of the different federation models that Fed4FIRE+ proposes to testbed owners in order to provide a complete view of the involved technologies. The paper is also presenting a survey of how several specific research platforms from different experimentation domains have fulfilled the federation task following Fed4FIRE+ concepts.