7TH FED4FIRE+ OPEN CALL – LARGE EXPERIMENTS

Deadline: Feb 25, 2020  
CALL EXPIRED

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 7th Open Call targets one specific category for experiments:

• “Large Experiments” with a maximum budget (including the financial support to the Fed4FIRE+ partner(s) acting as a Patron) of € 100 000 and a maximum duration of 10 months.

This 7th Open Call focusses on experiments in the area of “Cloud, big data and machine learning”. 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 “Cloud, big data and machine learning” will be favourised during evaluation.

• The focus on “Cloud, big data and machine learning” targets larger scale experiments and covers topics such as (non exhaustive list): (distributed) cloud or containerization research, optimising or evaluating big data processing stacks, comparing big data or machine learning workflows, using big data or machine learning techniques on data collected on e.g. wireless, IoT or network testbeds (=multi-testbed experiments), scaling/speeding up of machine learning, experiments on on-demand cloud, containerization, big data or machine learning technology, ...

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 be 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 theobjectiveandresultsoftheexperiment
  o theimpactoftheexperimentontheproposers’business.
  o ThefeedbacktowardstheFed4FIRE+consortiumontheuseofthefacilities

• 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.

6.2.1 FEC7 (March/April 2020): Poznan, Poland

• To be attended by all selected experimenters

• Objective: attend tutorials and learn about Fed4FIRE+

6.2.2 Review Meeting (March/April 2021): Location TBC

• To be attended by all finished experiments in this Open Call (Large Experiments)

• Objective:
  o presentations by the finished experiments will serve as tutorials and demonstrations

  towards participants and new experiments attending the event.
  o finished experiments will under go a formal review by the EC at this meeting.This

  formal review is required for obtaining full payment of the experimenters.

6.2.3 Project meetings

• 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 (FECs) should be used to discuss face-to-face.

7 Targeted timing:

7.1 Large Experiments

• Feasibility Check Deadline: 18 February 2020
  (draft proposal to Fed4FIRE+ partner(s) acting as Patron)

• Submission deadline: 25 February 2020 

• Targeted acknowledgment of selection: 10 March 2020

• Attending FEC7 Tutorials & Demos: 24-25 March 2020

• Start of the experiment: April 2020

• End of the experiment February 2021 (this includes the time needed for the final reporting)

• Submission of Report: 01 March 2021

• Presentation & Formal Review: March/April 2021

8 Open Research Data

8.1 Motivation & Principles

In order to support open and repeatable scientific experiments, the EC is advocating that experimenters publish their experiment data3,4. This is not mandatory: the EC recognises that there are legitimate reasons why experimenters may want to keep their data confidential. To support this in Fed4FIRE+, experimenters are encouraged (but not mandated) to create a data package containing their experiment results with all data that supports them, and upload it to the Fed4FIRE+ approved repository so that it may be found and reused by other interested parties.

The EC’s guiding principle regarding open research data is “AS OPEN AS POSSIBLE, AS CLOSED AS NECESSARY”. This means the default situation is that all experiment data should be open but if there are genuine reasons why experiment data is not to be opened, experimenters can opt out and their experiment data can be kept confidential. Fed4FIRE+ experimenters can opt out of opening data at any time up to the point of publication after the experiment has completed, even if they have previously declared that they want to open data. Experiment proposers need to state the reasons why they will not open data, and these can include:

• Commercial confidentiality & IPR

• Personal data

• Conflict with the experiment’s main objective

  In general, most academic experimenters are anticipated to want to open data in order to support their academic work, and most commercial experimenters will want to keep their data confidential, but the final decision is the experimenter’s, provided they give valid reasons for opting out of opening data.

8.2 Data Archive

The repository chosen for Fed4FIRE+ is Zenodo5. The reasons for this choice are given in detail in Fed4FIRE+ D2.1, Initial Guidelines on Data Management, but they are summarised here:

• Zenodo is hosted by CERN, so it is unlikely to disappear any time soon, and has a stated long- term data preservation policy.

• Zenodo exports descriptive metadata to ORD search engines, enabling the data to be easily found.

• Zenodo is an issuer of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)6, enabling the data to be uniquely identified.

• Zenodo is flexible on licensing of data.

   

Innovative Experiments

8.3 Innovative Experiments

Call identifier: F4Fp-07

Zenodo provides automated reporting to the EC for open data stored within it, so evidence of the commitment from Fed4FIRE+ and experimenters to provide open experiment data can be easily verified.

Funding Available

Funding to cover the experimenter’s costs in preparing the ORD data package is available from the Fed4FIRE+ Federator. This is additional to the support funding for experiments, and will be paid to an experimenter upon confirmation that their experiment data package is complete and uploaded into the Fed4FIRE+ approved data repository, Zenodo.

The funding available is capped to an upper limit of €500.

8.4 Process

The process for ORD in Fed4FIRE+ is shown in Figure 1. The left-hand column shows activities by the experimenter, and the right hand column shows activities by the Federator.

At experiment proposal time, the experimenter decides whether they want to open data. If they want to keep data confidential, they need to provide satisfactory reasons why not in their proposal. Valid reasons will not prejudice against funding for experiment proposals. If experimenters want to open data, they must complete a basic data management plan and include this with the proposal submission. If the proposal (including the basic DMP) is accepted, in addition to providing the experiment funding, the Federator puts aside funding to cover the experimenter’s extra costs in preparing the ORD package.

After the experiment is complete, the experimenter has another opportunity to decide whether they want to open their research data. If they wish to keep their data closed, they need to provide reasons in their experiment report. If they wish to open data, they must complete a more detailed DMP, prepare a data package including metadata describing the experiment data and upload the data package to Fed4FIRE+’s approved data repository, Zenodo. Zenodo will issue a Digital Object Identifier, and this must be submitted to the Federator. The Federator will check the existence and completeness of the data package, and if all is well, will authorise a cost claim for the experimenter covering their costs for opening data (up to a limit of €500).