Federation of Community Networking testbeds

Experimentation using testbeds has become increasingly important in the area of Community Networking research. An example is Community-Lab, a distributed testbed to support experimentally-driven research deployed in multiple real Community Networks across Europe. Diversity in the characteristics of Community Networks and the need to use multiple or distributed testbeds, also including laboratory or campus-wide testbeds has led to consider the opportunity and challenges of federation, so that interoperability is achieved and multiple testbeds can offer and combine their capabilities. As a result, research in community networking can benefit from experiments performed in diverse experimental testbeds, consecutively or concurrently, using a common architecture and standard APIs. This paper describes the testbed federation scenario to identify its main challenges and it presents the implementation of an federation service for the Community-Lab testbed that aims to enable the federation with other testbeds through the SFA standard. The service has been validated and it has reached operational status.