Community-Lab: Architecture of a Community Networking Testbed for the Future Internet

Community networks are an emerging and successful model for the Future Internet across Europe and far beyond. The CONFINE project complements existing FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) infrastructures by establishing Community-Lab, a new facility for experimentally- driven research built on the federation of existing community IP networks constituted by more than 20,000 nodes and 20,000 Km of links. In this paper we present the benefits of having such testbed for the research community as well as the improvement and evolution of community networks themselves. This paper presents i) the challenges and requirements for Community-Lab, ii) the resulting testbed architecture, iii) the current state of implementation and iv) the integration of the testbed with existing community networks.