Projects

Fraunhofer FOKUS and the NGN chair of TU-Berlin are engaged in several major Future Internet (FI) initiatives, namely Europe’s Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) program as well as Europe’s Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) initiative. Equally important and complementary to our European-wide FI engagement are our joint FI activities in Germany’s national German Lab(G-Lab) program.

The industry-driven, €600 million FI-PPP program, which was launched in May 2011, aims to boost Europe's competitiveness in FI technologies promoting FI applications of public and social relevance. By tightly integrating public service infrastructures and business processes with Internet networking and computing capabilities the FI-PPP enables the emergence of intelligent and efficient applications in sectors such as smart transport, smart health, smart energy or more generally in smart cities.

Fraunhofer FOKUS plays a key role in the FI-PPP, currently engaging in several FI-PPP projects. Within FI-WARE, we are contributing to the design and development of the FI-PPP Core Platform by integrating the OpenEPC, the de-facto standard platform for seamless and converged, QoS-enabled mobile NGN connectivity. Furthermore through design and development of a Unified Communication Framework on top of the converged connectivity layer and by contributing to FI-WARE’s work on connected devices, we help to enable a broad range of machine-to-machine (M2M) as well as mobile smart city applications. Furthermore Fraunhofer FOKUS is engaged in FI-PPP usage area projects like FI-CONTENT, where a number of novel and inventive scenarios for new forms of content are being developed, and OUTSMART, where a large variety of pilot services and technologies that contribute to optimised supply and access to services and resources in urban areas are being developed on top of FI-PPP’s Core Platform. Finally through our engagement in FI-PPP’s INFINITY project we help the FI-PPP to deploy and execute a broad range of smart applications on top of various European infrastructures. In INFINITY we are exploiting our expertise gained by our long-term engagement in FIRE (see below) and long-term expertise in cross-domain infrastructure and resource federation.

Another important track of our evolutionary FI R&D are EU FP6/FP7 FIRE projects like Onelab, Panlab, PII, TEFIS, BonFIRE, NOVI and OpenLab where large-scale experimental facilities are established that allow for a broad range of FI network and service related experimentation. These facilities can be used to execute large-scale experiments investigating evolutionary, but also revolutionary FI concepts and mechanisms. One of FIRE’s major goals is the creation of a large-scale European experimental facility by dynamically federating existing and upcoming testbeds for FI research. Fraunhofer FOKUS and TUB AV are key players in the research field of resource federation continuously enhancing Teagle, a generic, resource federation control unit which allows for federation of highly heterogeneous resources across multiple domains. Furthermore our team developed a cross-domain resource-access-policy engine that protects the participating federation domains from unintended resource usage, which is tightly interworking with the overall federation framework. Moreover, TU-Berlin developed and enhanced a monitoring framework which tightly integrates into the overall federation framework, thus realizing an integrated Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) platform.

As part of G-Lab, Fraunhofer FOKUS and TUB AV are investigating cross-layer network and service composition concepts and technology solutions, as well as enhanced cross-domain federation mechanisms within the G-Lab Deep project. Together with our partners from TU Kaiserlautern and University Duisburg-Essen we realize different voice scenarios on top of legacy networks in combination with new functional composition approaches where application layer requirements are negotiated between service and network layers in order to improve service offerings in terms of security, quality of service and reliability.