Proceedings of the 2014 26th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC) 978-0-9836283-9-2 c  2014 ITC 1 GÉANT World Testbed Facility Federated and distributed Testbeds as a Service facility of GÉANT Fabio Farina Consortium GARR – The Italian Academic and Research Network Rome, Italy fabio.farina@garr.it Peter Szegedi Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA) – Secretariat Amsterdam, Netherlands szegedi@terena.org Jerry Sobieski Nordic Infrastructure for Research & Education (NORDUnet) Copenhagen, Denmark jerry@nordu.net Abstract—Global network innovation requires large-scale distributed test facilities that are similar to the typically multi- domain 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. Keywords—Software Defined Networking, OpenFlow, Network Function Virtualization, Testbeds as a Service, GÉANT Word Testbed Facility, GN3plus Project I. INTRODUCTION Virtualization, in computing, traces its roots back to the 1960s when mainframes were logically partitioned for different applications to increase efficiency and spare space and power in the datacenters. By the beginning of the 2000s virtualization had reached the desktop and later the application layer. Network virtualization is the process of combining hardware and software network resources and network functionality into a single, software-based administrative entity. Network virtualization is the vital component for application development and testing environments. PlanetLab [1], initiated in 2002, was the first open platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale services. Although PlanetLab is still a popular tool for networked services research, it may not be used for research on lower layer network protocols and architectures. The GENI concept [2], started in 2007 in the US, addressed these shortcomings of PlanetLab and extends its virtualization principle to the whole diameter of the infrastructure with the notions of substrate, slicing and federation. The FEDERICA project [3] in the EU (2008-10) followed an architecture similar to GENI’s and, as there was an emerging user requirement, ensured the reproducibility of the complete testing environment and the repeatability of the experiments at a different location or time. FEDERICA leveraged the tools and techniques previously developed by other European projects such as MANTICORE, GEYSERS or UCLP [3]. Eventually, the infrastructure was adopted by the GN3 project in 2011 as the GÉANT Network Factory [4]. By that time, programmability of computer networking resources had become a major user requirement, which led to the development of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) concept [5] evolved from academic research in the US. SDN allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower level functionality. This is done by de-coupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) and the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane). SDN requires some method for the control plane to communicate with the data plane. One such mechanism, OpenFlow [6], gives access to the forwarding plane of a network switch or router over the network. Version 1.1 of the OpenFlow protocol was released in 2011 and adopted by many testbed projects around the world. The OFELIA project [7] in the EU (2010-13) developed a Control Framework (OCF) based on OpenFlow that is, used by the GÉANT OpenFlow Facility [8], among other projects. The FED4FIRE