4TH FED4FIRE+ OPEN CALL – EXPERIMENTS “Medium Experiments”

Deadline: Sep 18, 2018  
CALL EXPIRED

The major objective of this Call is to make Fed4FIRE’s federated infrastructure directly available for execution of innovative experiments by experimenters at both industrial (including SMEs) and research organisations. Examples of such experiments may include but are not limited to testing of new protocols or algorithms, performance measurements or scalability testing. These Calls envisage experiments by which existing products or services are tested, implemented or optimized on the Fed4FIRE+ testbeds rather than proposing or developing new ideas from scratch.

This call focusses on proposals of experiments in the area of IoT (Internet of Things) and 5G. More information on the specific objectives can be found further in the call document.

Funding for Experimenters:
Funding is available to support experimenters, as described in the following table.

Experiment Type
Medium

Max Experimenter Funding Per Experiment
€ 55 000

Testbed Patron Funding per experiment
€ 5000

Max number of experiments funded in this call
5

Max duration of experiment
5 months

Eligibility:

• Proposals will only be accepted from a single party eligible for participation in EC H2020-projects.

• Proposers must from parties or organisations that are not already part of the Fed4FIRE+ project consortium.

• Proposers can submit multiple experiment proposals, but only one experiment per proposer will be selected for funding in this Call.

• Proposers who have submitted proposals in previous calls of the Fed4FIRE+ - project are allowed to re-submit.

Detailed information about the open call and its aspects can be retrieved online
Language in which the proposal must be submitted: English
 

2 Introduction to Fed4FIRE+

Fed4FIRE+ is a Research and Innovation Action under the European Horizon 2020 Programme addressing the work programme topic Future Internet Research and Experimentation. The project started on 01 January 2017 and runs for 60 months, until the end of 2021.

The Fed4FIRE+ project has the objective to run and further improve Fed4FIRE+’s “best-in- town” federation of experimentation facilities for the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative. Federating a heterogeneous set of facilities covering technologies ranging from wireless, wired, cloud services and open flow, and making them accessible through common frameworks and tools suddenly opens new possibilities, supporting a broad range of experimenter communities covering a wide variety of Internet infrastructures, services and applications.

Fed4FIRE+ continuously upgrades and improves the facilities and include technical innovations, focused towards increased user satisfaction (user-friendly tools, privacy- oriented data management, testbed SLA and reputation, experiment reproducibility, service-level experiment orchestration, federation ontologies, etc.). It will open this federation to the whole community and beyond, for experimentation by industry and research organisations, through the organization of Open Calls and Open Access mechanisms

The project also offers a flexible, demand-driven framework which allows test facilities to join during the course of its lifetime by defining a set of entry requirements for new facilities to join and to comply with the federation.

Fed4FIRE+ also continues to build on the existing community of experimenters, testbeds and tool developers and bring them together regularly (two times a year) in engineering conferences to have maximal interaction between the different stakeholders involved.

An overview of the available FIRE facilities offered through Fed4FIRE+ can be retrieved at the facility overview page on the Fed4FIRE+ website1. Additional background information about both the offered facilities, the tools adopted by the federation, and the implementation steps needed from a facility when joining the federation can also be found in the Fed4FIRE+ training material2.

3 Objectives of the call

The major objective of this Open Call is to make the federated infrastructure directly available for execution of innovative experiments by experimenters at both industrial (including SMEs) and research organisations. These experiments should be of a duration as defined by the type of the call (Extra Small, Small, Medium or Large) and use one or more Fed4FIRE+ testbeds. Examples of such experiments may include but are not limited to testing of new protocols or algorithms, performance measurements, service experiments. It is required that these experimenters will come from parties or organisations that are not part of the Fed4FIRE+ project consortium.

In view of the targeted timeline and duration of the experiment, it should be clear that these Calls envisage experiments by which existing products or services are tested, implemented or optimized on the Fed4FIRE+ testbeds rather than proposing or developing new ideas from scratch. Examples of such experiments may include but are not limited to testing of new protocols or algorithms, performance measurements, service experiments.

The Fed4FIRE+ project is issuing this series of open and competitive calls for experiments with a degree of industrial and/or scientific innovation, relevance for the Fed4FIRE+ federation and an appropriate scale of complexity. Independent evaluations of the submitted proposals will be performed, in order to select experiments which will be executed within the project. It is required that the experiments are performed by a single organization.

This 4th Open Call targets one specific category for experiments:

• “Medium Experiments” with a maximum budget (including the financial support to the Fed4FIRE+ partner(s) acting as a Patron) of € 60 000 and a maximum duration of 5 months.

This 4th Open Call focusses on experiments in the area of IoT (Internet of Things) and 5G. Experiments targeting other areas, applications and/or technologies can also be submitted, however the focus of this call implies that experiments in the area of IoT and 5G will be favourised during evaluation.

• The focus on IoT covers topics such as (non exhaustive list): smart devices, smart buildings, smart cities, smart interfaces, sensors and monitoring devices and (wireless) IoT networks and protocols, IoT architectures, security, power consumption, battery life,..

• The focus on 5G covers topics such as (non exhaustive list): networks, MIMO, Multi-Radio Access technologies, end-to-end performance, contextual awareness, intelligent data mining, (distributed) cloud, software-defined networking and network function virtualization. new applications and requirements

Benefits for an experimenter to propose experiments on the Fed4FIRE+ federation of testbeds:

• Possibility to perform experiments that break the boundaries of different testbeds or domains (wireless, 5G, wired, OpenFlow, cloud computing, smart cities, services, etc.)

• Easily access all the required resources with a single account.

• Focus on your core task of experimentation, instead of on practical aspects such as learning to work with different tools for each testbed, requesting accounts on each testbed separately, etc.

• An extra benefit which is offered in this call is the dedicated support from specific Fed4FIRE members. Each proposer, preparing a proposal is required to seek a supporting Fed4FIRE consortium partner or partners (the “Patron”) that will be in charge of dedicated (advanced) support of the experiment.

4 Eligibility

• Proposals will only be accepted from parties eligible for participation in EC H2020-projects.

• Proposals will only be accepted from single parties (no consortia are allowed).

• Proposers must from parties or organisations that are not already part of the Fed4FIRE+ project consortium.

• Proposers can submit multiple experiment proposals, but only one experiment per proposer will be selected for funding in this Call. In case multiple proposals are submitted by the same party, reference should be made to each submitted proposal and clear indication should be given on the complementarity of the proposals.

• Proposers who have submitted proposals in previous calls of the Fed4FIRE+ - project are allowed to re-submit. Details on how this information needs to be included in the proposal are given below and should be included in a specific section in the proposal (cfr. Proposal template)

  • Parties who have submitted proposals in previous calls which were NOT selected for funding should indicate the exact dates and details of the previous submissions.

  • Parties who have submitted proposals in previous calls which were selected for funding should indicate the difference between the current proposal and the previously submitted proposal.

  • Parties belonging to a legal entity of which other groups have submitted proposals in previous calls also need to indicate the difference between the current proposal and the previously submitted proposals.

5 Inclusion into the consortium

Once a party is selected to perform the proposed experiment, it will be contracted by the project coordinator (imec) as a 3rd Party receiving financial support. This will require the signature of the Agreement of which can be found as download on the Fed4FIRE+ website together with this Call information.

6 Participation in meetings and submission of reports

6.1 Submission of reports

(templates can be found as download on the Fed4FIRE+ website together with this Call information)

The proposer will need, if its experiment is selected for funding:

• To submit a report at the end of the experiment using the template in Annex 2 to this document.

• To prepare a Poster (A1-format) describing the objective and results of the experiment as well as the impact of the experiment on the proposers’ business. This poster can be used by the Fed4FIRE+ consortium at public events and will be used at the occasion of the review meetings.

• To prepare a flyer (2 A4-pages) describing the objective and results of the experiment as well as the impact of the experiment on the proposers’ business. This flyer can be used by the Fed4FIRE+ consortium at public events.

• To prepare a presentation and demo explaining and illustrating:

  • o the objective and results of the experiment
  • o the impact of the experiment on the proposers’ business.
  • o The feedback towards the Fed4FIRE+ consortium on the use of the facilities

• The production of a short video about the experiment is recommended. This video will be used by the Fed4FIRE+ project at public events.

6.2 Attendance at meetings

Attendance at the meetings listed below is required. It is therefore recommended to budget these in the proposal.

• FEC4 (October 8-10, 2018): Brugge, Belgium:

• o To be attended by all selected experimenters
• o Objective: attend tutorials and learn about Fed4FIRE+

• FEC5 & Formal Review Meeting (March 2018): Location TBD

• o To be attended by all finished experiments in this Open Call o Objective:
  • §  presentations by the finished and running experiments will serve as tutorials and demonstrations towards participants and new experiments attending the event.
  • §  finished experiments will undergo a formal review by the EC at this FEC5. This formal review is required for obtaining full payment of the experimenters.

• Project meetings

• o As the experimenter will be linked to the project as 3rd Party, there will no possibility to attend formal meetings of the consortium but specific (remote) meetings regarding the experiment can be set up with Fed4FIRE+ partners. The engineering conferences should be used to discuss face-to-face.

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