Emerging testing trends and the Panlab enabling infrastructure

Networks, services, and business models need to be piloted in a large-scale environment that mimics as far as possible the Internet and its future version, although we certainly do not know what this will look like. In this highly demanding and dynamic context, new frameworks and (meta-) architectures for supporting experimentation are proposed, aiming at discovering how existing and emerging testbeds and experimental resources can be put together in such a way that testing and experimentation may be carried out according to specific requirements (industry, academia, etc.). The work presented in this article addresses a number of the fundamental principles and their corresponding technology implementations that enable the provisioning of large-scale testbeds for testing and experimentation as well as deploying future Internet platforms for piloting novel applications. The proposed concepts and architecture of Panlab, a pan-European testbed federation, aspires to facilitate and support user needs in these new areas.