The SLICES partners have attended seven meetings organised by the ITU-T Focus Group on Testbeds Federations for IMT-2020 and beyond (FG-TBFxG). An ultimate meeting is scheduled in April 2024 to finalise the latest deliverables of the Focus Group, before their submission to ITU-T Study Group 11 (SG11) “Signalling requirements, protocols, test specifications and combating counterfeit telecommunication/ICT devices”. The SLICES partners have actively contributed to the different topics concerning the interconnection, the integration and the interoperability of testbeds. Indeed, 20 contributions realised in the
context of SLICES were submitted before the seven meetings. The Recommendation ITU-T Q.4068 “Open application program interfaces (APIs) for interoperable testbed federations” is the basis of the work currently undertaken by the Focus Group on Testbeds Federation and SLICES partners have specified in more technical details all the APIs used to connect the different testbeds and to fully implement the concept of Testbeds as a Service. The different
technical specifications written by the participants of the ITU-T FG-TBFxG take into account the needs and the requirements of SLICES users such as the testbed providers and researchers. Indeed, the experience and the expertise of the SLICES partners permitted to advance the technical specifications and reports in the different topics linked to the testbed federations. Several use cases involving different testbeds were also provided by SLICES partners. SLICES has also elaborated useful inputs concerning the taxonomy to be used in the context of testbed federations. The different deliverables produced by the ITU-T FG-TBFxG can be used as inputs and references for the design and the development of the SLICES Research Infrastructure.

The last FG-TBFxG meeting is scheduled in April 2024. You can find more information at:
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/tbfxg/Pages/default.aspx