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This article presents the design and pilot implementation of a suite of intelligent methods, algorithms, and tools for federating heterogeneous experimental platforms (domains) toward a holistic Future Internet experimentation ecosystem. The proposed framework developed within the NOVI research and experimentation European collaborative effort, aims at providing a modular data, control, and management plane architecture that includes: an information model capturing the abstractions of virtualized resources residing in different yet interworking experimental platforms; resource mapping algorithms tackling the inter-domain virtual network embedding problem; mechanisms providing interoperability of monitoring tools; policy-based management services for role-based intra and inter-domain management policies; and dataplane stitching mechanisms to enable the composition of user-specific slices (baskets of virtual resources drawn from the federated substrate). The NOVI framework was deployed and validated in a combined testbed consisting of two dissimilar platforms: a private PlanetLab domain with resources interconnected over the public Internet; and FEDERICA, an infrastructure of virtual resources interconnected via dedicated networking facilities of European National Research and Education Networks and GEANT. This pre-normative work is expected to contribute to bridging Future Internet experimental federations with interconnected cloud architectures and interworked public/private data-centers, adding value via its intelligent services, information models, and composite algorithms., Postprint (author's final draft)

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works, Cloud computing builds upon advances on virtualization and distributed computing to support cost-efficient usage of computing resources, emphasizing on resource scalability and on demand services. Moving away from traditional data-center oriented models, distributed clouds extend over a loosely coupled federated substrate, offering enhanced communication and computational services to target end-users with quality of service (QoS) requirements, as dictated by the future Internet vision. Toward facilitating the efficient realization of such networked computing environments, computing and networking resources need to be jointly treated and optimized. This requires delivery of user-driven sets of virtual resources, dynamically allocated to actual substrate resources within networked clouds, creating the need to revisit resource mapping algorithms and tailor them to a composite virtual resource mapping problem. In this paper, toward providing a unified resource allocation framework for networked clouds, we first formulate the optimal networked cloud mapping problem as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem, indicating objectives related to cost efficiency of the resource mapping procedure, while abiding by user requests for QoS-aware virtual resources. We subsequently propose a method for the efficient mapping of resource requests onto a shared substrate interconnecting various islands of computing resources, and adopt a heuristic methodology to address the problem. The efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated in a simulation/emulation environment, that allows for a flexible, structured, and comparative performance evaluation. We conclude by outlining a proof-ofconcept realization of our proposed schema, mounted over the European future Internet test-bed FEDERICA, a resource virtualization platform augmented with network and computing facilities., This work has been partially supported by the European Commission, 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, Capacities, Grant No. 257867 - NOVI., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)