XIFI

The Future Internet (FI) is an emerging, open, communications infrastructure, which supports more services and applications and is better coupled to users and the physical world. The Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP: www.fi-ppp.eu) initiative aims to promote FI adoption by supporting the development of a common platform supporting large-scale trials running on a wide range of FI infrastructure.

The XIFI project addresses the infrastructure element of this initiative by paving the way for a unified European market for FI facilities enabling commercial exploitation. The creation of a sustainable pan-European open federation of test infrastructures is a key milestone, overcoming the current fragmentation of European infrastructure into isolated test beds that are individually unable to support large-scale trials, and opening the way for widespread and replicable commercial exploitation of FI services and applications.

XIFI establishes a marketplace for test infrastructures and FI services. It will be able to cope with large trial deployments involving the users as the centre of the innovation process. Initially, XIFI is setting up a core federation of test infrastructures comprised of five nodes, assisted by investments in pan-European infrastructure such as GÉANT. Later, more infrastructures will be added to the federation, preparing to respond to a broader set of FI users and experimenters. As such, XIFI should also be considered not only in the context of the FI-PPP, but also in the context of e-Infrastructures Europe. From this aspect the work carried out within the e-IRG is very relevant for XIFI.

In the second year of its operation, XIFI plans to extend its core federation by additional nodes capable to support the same level of services