Marconi Joins EU Test Project

LONDON -- The IST project “Multi-Partner European Test Beds for Research Networking” (MUPBED) is a European Union (EU) funded project within the IST priority (Information Society Technologies). MUPBED started in July 2004 and will run over 3 years with an overall budget of 9.5 million €, of which the European Commission is funding 5.3 million €. The project is part of the IST Thematic Priority focussing on “Research Networking Test Beds”. The MUPBED consortium consists of 16 partners from 8 European countries, representing major network operators, system vendors, research and education networks, and research institutes.

The main objective of MUPBED is to investigate and to demonstrate advanced network technologies and solutions that will help to build future ultra-broadband research networks, which are fundamental building blocks to ensure the competitiveness of research in Europe.

“The advanced applications and collaborative systems of the research and scientific community increase the requirements for the communication networks interconnecting the various research centres and users“, says MUPBED project co-ordinator Jan Spaeth, Marconi. “Based on a strong consortium of leading European players and on a strong asset of advanced test bed environments, MUPBED has all the prerequisites to make a real step forward towards the future of research networks.”

To achieve this goal, MUPBED will carefully investigate requirements of advanced multimedia research applications and collaborative systems like GRIDs, based on which appropriate network architecture solutions will be developed, taking latest technological progress into account. One key aspect will be the introduction of latest ASON/GMPLS (Automatically Switched Optical Networks/Generalised Multi-Protocol Label Switching) control plane technologies into research networks in a multi-domain environment. These technologies allow a flexible and dynamic configuration of connections by distributed control processes in the network. Furthermore, the integration of high-demand applications and flexible communication networks requires new solutions that will be investigated by MUPBED.

An important contribution of MUPBED is that these concepts will be implemented and demonstrated in a large, pan-European test bed environment, comprising interconnected sites in various countries such as Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Sweden, as well as being evaluated on a theoretical basis. To achieve a broad coverage of user requirements as well as a broad dissemination of project results this platform will also be offered to other users that are not part of the project consortium. Apart from demonstration and dissemination of the results to a broad public, the achievements of the project will also be used to drive standardisation in this area forward, which is a key issue to achieve cost-efficient and interoperable solutions.

Marconi Corp. plc