EU – Panlab

Overall Scope

Key Information

Runs from: June 2008 – March 2011 (34 months)

Website(s): http://www.panlab.net, http://www.fire-teagle.org, http://trac.panlab.net/trac/

Summary

Panlab provides a large scale experimental facility offering heterogeneous testbed resources to address the need of large scale testing and experimentation. The facility is composed of various testbeds forming a testbed federation among regional innovation clusters. Users of the facility can rely on a pool of federated resources to carry out testing and research & development activities. The facility is operated by a Panlab office that acts as a broker for the participating testbeds and offers central services and tools to both partners and users of the federation. In this regard an important tool is “Teagle” which relies on a federation control framework and provides a model-based resource registry, a testbed design environment, as well as an orchestration engine that collectively allow for easy resource configuration, deployment, and management.

Objectives

• Develop mechanisms and tools to describe, store, locate, and orchestrate experimental facility resources and testing services to provide composite testbeds across multiple administrative domains
• Define and implement a common abstract framework that enables the interconnection of diverse testbeds
• Integrate the concept of User Driven Innovation and execute a techno-socio-economic study to assess the long-term sustainability of the federation model

Highlights

• Design and implementation of a control framework that allows for management of highly heterogeneous resources across the boundaries of organizational domains
• Design and implementation of the Teagle framework that enables users of the federated testbeds to compose virtual testbeds consisting of diverse and distributed federated resources
• Design and implementation of domain border gateways that allows to establish dynamic overlay networks to interconnect distributed resources and separate traffic from concurrent experiments
• Cross-regional and cross-national cooperation of testbeds to leverage existing investments in experimental infrastructure
• Open Source implementation of components to enable further development by subsequent projects
• Collaboration and training activities in 5 regional innovation clusters to address the testing/experimentation needs of SMEs and academia
• International cooperation (Canada and US) to further increase the impact of Panlab results

R&D Scope

Use cases exemplify the potential of the results, and the flexibility of the solution to support very divergent future Internet testing and experimentation needs. An excerpt out of many possible and demonstrated use cases is provided below:

• End-to-end self-management in a wireless future Internet environment: This experiment aims at the improvement of QoS features (e.g., packet loss, delay, jitter) using new software for self-management over a live network environment and exploiting monitoring and configuration capabilities that different administrative domains provide.
• Adaptive admission control and resource allocation algorithms: This experiment aims at the assessment of such new algorithms and demonstrates a new federation computing interface (FCI) allowing the direct control of the used resources. Through FCI the experimental infrastructure exhibits elasticity characteristics.
• Enhanced web TV services over mobile phones: This experiment not only provides the possibility to perform test upon a video on demand platform, but it extends the environment setup to include end users in a real mobile operator context.

Additionally, the Panlab core components themselves rely on advanced internet technology:

• The Teagle repository is based in an extended version of the DEN-ng Information Model (http://www.autonomic-management.org/denng/index.php) that allows the technology agnostic description of resources and supports resource management through policies.
• In Teagle and the underlying control framework everything is treated as a service. This allows the central Teagle orchestration engine to build advanced workflows establishing distributed virtual testbeds. Such workflows can be stored and re-executed to re-build a certain testbed (e.g. to validate and compare previous results).
• The control framework foresees domain border gateways that allow establishing of dynamic overlay networks to interconnect distributed resources and separate traffic from concurrent experiments. It relies on IP‐in‐IP and Layer2 tunnelling (L2TP) technology and builds a full mesh between participating domains. This allows Panlab to offer a flexible facility supporting a wide range of testing and experimentation scenarios.

Expected Impact

• Improvement of the FIRE (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fire) facility offering
• Sustainability model for experimental infrastructure
• Improvement of testbed infrastructure efficiency (the federation as additional distribution channel)
• Impact on testbed business model (through more customers and the additional federation channel, planning security regarding investments in infrastructure is increased and investments can pay off faster)

Involved Constituency

• The Panlab Partner is provider of infrastructural resources (testbed components, e.g. hardware, software, VMs, etc.) necessary to support the testing services requested by customers. Partners interact with Panlab Office for offering their testbed(s) to customers.
• The Panlab Customer has access to specific infrastructure and functionality necessary to perform testing and experimentation. The facility resources are advertised and provided by the Panlab Office to the Panlab Customer in order to carry out R&D activities, implement and evaluate new technologies, products, or services.
• The Panlab Office realizes a brokering service for the testing facilities by coordinating i) legal and operational processes, ii) the provisioning of the infrastructures and services to be used for testing and experimentation, iii) the interconnectivity of the various Panlab Partner test-sites, and iv) the interconnectivity between the test-sites and the customers.
• It is expected that the Panlab Office has been established by the end of 2010 and operates based on a commission model. A WIN-WIN-WIN (Partner, Customer, Office) model is intended. Additional seed funding/startup capital might be needed.