Smart city applications require pervasive and large-scale infrastructures, which include heterogeneous IoT devices and distributed information systems, thus posing interoperability and cost challenges. Interoperable solutions, exploiting fog/edge/cloud computing resources, are fundamental for fair competition, especially in public procurements, while costs savings are necessary to speed up the smart city innovation pace, by enabling more stakeholders to easily enter the market, especially SMEs. The Fed4IoT project faces the interoperability issue, focusing on large scale environments and addressing the problem at different and synergic levels: device, platform and information. The goal of the project is “Federating IoT and Cloud Infrastructures to Provide Scalable and Interoperable Smart Cities Applications by introducing novel IoT virtualization technologies” and will be pursued through the following steps: 1) select/integrate/improve existing IoT and cloud platforms, including oneM2M, FIWARE and 5G ETSI MEC, so as to establish a reference interoperability solution; 2) use such reference solution to build up a pool of federated IoT and fog/edge/cloud resources; 3) design novel device-level IoT virtualization technologies to create "IoT slices" formed by virtual IoT devices and computing resources, exploiting the federated resource pool; 4) support orchestration and programmability for optimal IoT virtual function deployment and Big Data processing; 5) integrate information coming from different IoT domains and other city sources; 6) integrate the system components. The project solutions will be technically validated by implementing four specific smart city applications, based on a federated EU/JP platform, deployed in real life systems in two EU and two JP cities. The Fed4IoT consortium will also actively support standardization activities (ETSI, oneM2M, ITU, ISO, etc.) and EU/JP initiatives (e.g., AIOTI and ITAC), where consortium members are already involved.

The development of the Internet of Things is set to have a strong impact on many aspects of society. Test-beds and experimental facilities, both of small scale and up to city scale, will be an essential enabler to facilitate the development of this vision. Facilitating the access to these test-beds to a large community of experimenters approach is a key asset to the development of a large and active community of application developers, necessary to address the many challenges faced by European and Japanese societies. FESTIVAL project’s vision is to provide IoT experimentation platforms providing interaction facility with physical environments and end-users, where experimenters can validate their Smart ICT service developments in various domains such as smart city, smart building, smart public services, smart shopping, participatory sensing, etc. FESTIVAL testbeds will connect cyber world to the physical world, from large scale deployments at a city scale, to small platforms in lab environments and dedicated physical spaces simulating real-life settings. Those platforms will be connected and federated via homogeneous access APIs with an “Experimentation as a Service” (EaaS) model for experimenters to test their added value services. There have been long years of research work in Europe and Japan on federation of testbeds and more recently on IoT testbeds. FESTIVAL will as much as possible make reuse of existing software and hardware available in Europe and in Japan for building such testbeds. Mutually applying European enablers for Japanese testbeds and vice versa in real-life trials that the project will organize, FESTIVAL will bring have a strong impact in bridging the gap among the aforementioned component technologies. FESTIVAL, as a common testbed infrastructure for efficient communication and collaboration among stakeholders, will push European and Japanese IoT testbeds and their practices one step beyond the current state of the art.