Collaborative Research Project within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission

Partners :

European Center for Information and Communication Technologies, Germany
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Germany
University of Essex, United Kingdom
i2CAT Foundation, Research and Innovation in the Internet Area, Spain
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
NEC Europe Ltd., United Kingdom
Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology, Belgium
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland
Stanford University, USA
ADVA AG Optical Networking, Germany

October 2010 to September 2013

The increasing complexity and fundamental problems in today’s Internet architectural design and its deployment have led to significant research efforts in the area of Future Internet in Europe and Clean Slate Design in the U.S. This encompasses research in application and network services as well as infrastructure. While it is important to isolate experiments from interfering with business and production needs, they are often only meaningful if they can be run in an environment that supplies them with production-like, real-world uses and corresponding traffic.

The conceptual approach taken by OFELIA is to provide an experimentation space which allows for flexible integration of test and production traffic, while protecting the real world from artifacts generated by experiments. OFELIA will provide facilities to use production traffic for providing realistic test scenarios and for seamlessly migrating successfully tested technologies to the production environment.

The facility will be based on OpenFlow enabled carrier grade equipment thus allowing performance tests under production conditions.
OFELIA will close a gap in the test offerings of current experimental facilities. It will allow the research community to perform disruptive research on new protocol ideas or network algorithms by means of the capabilities offered by OpenFlow.
The project comprises three stages:

• In the first stage five islands will be realized at 5 different universities and research institutions in Europe (TU Berlin, ETH Zürich, IBBT Gent, University of Essex, I2Cat Barcelona). While the islands will be equipped with different systems and technologies, in order to give the research community a bundle of optics of testing of packet related technology and optical technology OpenFlow will be the common control philosophy hardware edge.
• In its second stage, OFELIA’s islands will be connected. This connection will be based on a minimum of 1Gbit/s Ethernet tunnels in a star configuration (with the hub at IBBT in Gent).
• The third stage will see the integration of use cases that come in through the process of Open Calls. Two open calls will be published to invite experimenters that bring their use cases and scenarios to the facility creating a feedback loop to extend the OFELIA facility according to the needs of the user community.
  

In the OFELIA project, NEC will

• Provide the homogeneous L2 hardware platform (OF-enabled Ethernet switches)
• Contribute to topics related to instrumentation and testing solutions for the individual islands; and create a framework for network visibility and monitoring.
• Contribute to OFELIA management and monitoring software implementation for multi-domain configuration and federation of controllers among different islands. In addition, NEC will contribute to topics related to monitoring and troubleshooting of the facility and multi-domain federation of facility controllers.
• Take the lead in the dissemination, standardization, and international cooperation work package. All Partners will contribute to the dissemination of the project’s results. In particular, after phase one has finished IBBT and i2CAT e.g. will contribute with tutorials during events such as FIREweek or the FIA. NEC will act as contact point for the AKARI project and test network.

NEC and DTAG, being well-established contributors to the IETF, will drive the IETF-related activities.

Please find the project’s publications at the official OFELIA web site.

Official OFELIA Web Site