A Path to Evolve to Federation of TestBeds

Federating the numerous existing networking testbeds offers multiple possible benefits, but so far testbeds and federation efforts remained semi-independent, and not wholly united as a single federation. We identify several problems against federation, namely, establishing new trust relations and agreeing on a common schema between the entities. In this paper we explore practical ways to set up federations by making use of the existing organization to user, and inter-organizational trust relations. First we give an analysis of the existing testbeds and federations in terms of their trust models, and the set of technologies they use. Next, we argue for a design of a federation which leverages existing trust relationships. Our prototype implementation shows how readily this design can be implemented using a minimal set of schema and technologies being used by the existing testbeds and federations. Using our analysis we then show how this design can be expanded for larger scale federations, and give examples of possible future trust models.