The UK Programmable Fixed and Mobile Internet Infrastructure: Overview, Capabilities and Use Cases Deployment

Leading state-of-the-art research facilities at the Universities of Edinburgh (UoE), Bristol (UoB), Lancaster (UoLan), King’s College London (KCL) and Digital Catapult (DCAT) are interconnected through a dedicated JISC/JANET network infrastructure. Using Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies, these distributed test-beds are integrated using a multi-domain NFV Orchestrator. This paper introduces a novel specialist distributed test-bed developed for facilitating the increasingly large and complex experimentation of future Internet system architectures, technologies, services and applications between the geographically dispersed laboratories across the UK. The aim is to enable students, researchers and enterprises to interconnect with and carry out remote experiments using these test-beds. Each one contributes a range of key capabilities for Internet research including optical networks, optical wireless and radio frequency communications, Internet of Things (IoT), SDN, NFV, as well as cloud computing technologies and services.