FIRMA: A future internet resource management architecture

Internet is broken and there are several approaches to fix it. In order to validate the different attempts, they need to be evaluated within large-scale environments involving numerous heterogeneous resources. As a result, several testbeds have been established along with a number of competitive mechanisms to federate them. Since most of these protocols try to address similar issues, combining and unifying them is subject of current research. This leads to a complex environment for testbed owners and developers. Furthermore, it is foreseeable that even more federation approaches in different application domains will emerge in the future. Therefore, we propose an extensible architecture that allows to be federation protocol agnostic. The fundamental idea is to allow interoperability on the level of a semantic information model and to separate delivery mechanism specific implementations from a common core. The requirements for such an architecture have been extracted from latest European Future Internet research projects and its practicability is being evaluated by an initial implementation.