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Digital Infrastructures and the future Internet including 5G and beyond technologies are the main enabling factors contributing to the digital transformation of our society. The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the vital role of digital infrastructures and showed they should be reinforced. Their design, deployment and operation are critical, calling for a scientific instrument to support the research in this domain for computer science and infrastructure researchers, as well as for data driven scientific applications involving interdisciplinary aspects. This report summarizes the analysis of the current technological status and capabilities of existing ICT Research Infrastructures in Europe as it stands for the beginning of 2021. The analysis has been performed by the authors and reflects the knowledge gathered and processed by the authors using public documentation (e.g., available on the projects’ websites) and through personal communication between sources of information in particular Member States. This report does not intend to replace and override documentation prepared by larger communities and organizations (e.g., the European Commission, ESFRI or e-IRG). Instead, this report complements existing efforts made so far with a primary focus on ICT technologies related to SLICES and with new information received from Member States, not necessarily already included in above mentioned state-of-the-art reports. This report has been prepared by SLICES-DS Partners with support and advice from the following organisations: Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (Poland), Sorbonne University (France), INRIA (France), MTA Sztaki (Hungary), Technical University of Munich (Germany), UPV/EHU (Spain), UC3M (Spain), UCLAN (Cyprus), Université Du Luxembourg (Luxembourg), SIMULA (Norway), CNR (Italy), Mandat International (Switzerland), KTH (Sweden), University of Gent (Belgium) and RNP (Brazil). The document is intended at ESFRI stakeholders, policy makers, researchers and RI managers.

This paper describes research carried out by the GN3 project into network federation, i.e. sharing resources among multiple independent networks. The aim of the research is to investigate how federated networks can contribute to the research and education networks’ goal of improving performance and end-user service and reducing costs. To achieve this objective, we have assessed user demand for federated networks, analysing current and future projects requiring international data transmission, and investigated the three key building blocks for federated networks –network, operations and services – with particular reference to their current status among European NRENs and their potential usefulness or limitations for establishing a federation of research networks. We have used our findings to consider the architectural principles of federated networksand to develop models that optimise the use of shared resources and improve services. We have developed test cases to help refine the models, including one to support the Large Hadron Collider network, and have assessed the implications of a federated approach for both network operations and service delivery. Each of these aspects of our research is described in this paper, prefaced by a summary of the benefits and challenges of network federation and concluding with an outline of future work. The research’s originality lies in its exploitation of leading- edge technologies, its innovative proposals for international collaboration, its access to and application of primary data sources. The results are of valuenot onlyto GÉANT and European NRENs but also to any special- purposenetwork and core networks in general.

Cloud computing service emerged as an essential component of the Enterprise IT infrastructure. Migration towards a full range and large-scale convergence of Cloud and network services has become the current trend for addressing requirements of the Cloud environment. Our approach takes the infrastructure as a service paradigm to build converged virtual infrastructures, which allow offering tailored performance and enable multi-tenancy over a common physical infrastructure. Thanks to virtualization, new exploitation activities of the physical infrastructures may arise for both transport network and Data Centres services. This approach makes network and Data Centres' resources dedicated to Cloud Computing to converge on the same flexible and scalable level. The work presented here is based on the automation of the virtual infrastructure provisioning service. On top of the virtual infrastructures, a coordinated operation and control of the different resources is performed with the objective of automatically tailoring connectivity services to the Cloud service dynamics. Furthermore, in order to support elasticity of the Cloud services through the optical network, dynamic re-planning features have been provided to the virtual infrastructure service, which allows scaling up or down existing virtual infrastructures to optimize resource utilization and dynamically adapt to users' demands. Thus, the dynamic re-planning of the service becomes key component for the coordination of Cloud and optical network resource in an optimal way in terms of resource utilization. The presented work is complemented with a use case of the virtual infrastructure service being adopted in a distributed Enterprise Information System, that scales up and down as a function of the application requests. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.