Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) have become a critical element of the Internet, as they provide the physical locations where networks interconnect and exchange traffic. IXPs carry huge traffic volumes, reduce interconnection costs, and hence make national Internet access affordable. Despite the growth of these infrastructures, the rapid evolution of the Internet poses new challenges. Reacting as soon as possible to the highly dynamic Internet environment has always been the first priority for Network Operators. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art techniques are extremely limited. Networks use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to inform each other of which destinations are reachable. Accordingly, network operators (ab)use BGP Traffic Engineering (TE) to tweak traffic paths. TE is a network-management tool allowing a network to adapt events ranging from a change in customer location to mitigating dramatically large traffic outbursts of a malicious Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. However, BGP-TE lacks programmability and dynamism: once BGP preferences are set up, they cannot react in real-time to network events. With a high-fidelity measurement-focused approach, a network could implement more sophisticated traffic management techniques. For example, any network connected through an IXP must implement ingress traffic filtering to avoid receiving undesirable traffic (e.g., DDoS attacks or resulting from misconfigurations). However, correctly controlling ingress filters is complex. Thus, most IXP customers unrealistically expect the organisations originating the traffic to manage any problem. TE limitations result from the inability of current Internet monitoring techniques to cope with the wide range of granularities of network events. While control plane related events (those concerned with the selection of paths/routes, such as BGP updates) happen at a time scale of minutes, data plane events (packet processing) occur at time-scales of micro-seconds. While control plane monitoring is relatively easy, data plane observability is poor, relies on expensive equipment, and does not scale. EARL addresses this imbalance between the ability to observe control and data plane, and the consequent limits on the detection and reaction to network events. EARL is a novel integration of monitoring mechanisms and reactive network management. EARL enables a prompt reaction to network events with its Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach. Because of the IXP's central role on the Internet and the critical nature at the national level, we believe that they are the ideal place to explore EARL's ideas. We will demonstrate how measurement-assisted network management permits new Internet-wide services and, enables the provision of services hitherto considered impossible or too costly to deploy. Our goal for the EARL project is to pioneer SDN enabled measurement-based network management to enhance the Internet infrastructure. This will lead to relevant tools and data for the larger researcher and practitioner communities. To this aim, we will create a new research instrument, EARLnet: an operational, research-centered, Autonomous System (AS) directly connected to our partners, providing a new and unique real-world environment for the real-time monitoring of network status and SDN-oriented research. EARLnet will serve also as a test-bed to develop and evaluate novel reactive network management solutions. The EARL project has the potential to revolutionise current Internet network management through new fine-grained and reactive TE policies. EARL will not only create new mechanisms, but also translate the blind, legacy BGP-based, TE into measurement-assisted SDN techniques. Furthermore, through our partner institution, the Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre (CCCC), EARLnet will provide valuable data to a large community of researchers and practitioners.

Understanding the behaviour of the Internet with its inherent complexity and scale is essential when designing new Internet systems and applications. Simulation, emulation, and test-bed experiments are important techniques for investigating large-scale complex Internet systems. It is now widely recognised that classical theoretical/simulation scalability studies for Internet research are unreliable without relevant and representative supporting experimental evidence. This is increasingly important with the emergence of 5G, cloud services and IoT, which lead to at least 2 orders increase in connection capacity requirements and 3 orders of additional devices that require Internet connectivity. Great progress has been made in the UK over the years on the development of communications laboratories infrastructure in ICT domains such as optical & wireless, signal processing, networks and distributed systems, where the UK is internationally leading. However, UK telecommunications research remains largely segregated in independent optical, wireless or computer network research labs, so researchers very rarely have the opportunity to experiment across the boundaries between these disciplines. Due to the limitations of performing research in discipline-specific facilities, the current UK ICT research output does not address realistic end-to-end Internet systems INITIATE will create a new, specialist distributed test-bed to facilitate the increasingly large and complex experimentation required for future Internet research. This will be achieved by interconnecting operational, state-of-the-art operational laboratories at the Universities of Bristol, Lancaster (UoLan), Edinburgh (UoEd) and Kings College London (KCL). These laboratories will contribute many key capabilities for Internet research including optical networks, wireless/RF communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and cloud computing. Therefore INITIATE will offer the combined capability to the UK Internet research and innovation communities as a single distributed test-bed able to support the increasingly complex experimentation required for future Internet research. For example, INITIATE will enable for the first time experimentally driven research addressing the integration of multi-domain and multi-technology 5G and IoT access platforms with high-speed optical transport and investigate full system optimization strategies. Uniquely, INITIATE will also be able to integrate end-users as part of the experimental process and support user driven scenarios such as mobile edge computing, data visualization and autonomous mobility. The applicants have an outstanding worldwide reputation for creating, maintaining and operating research test-beds. They have repeatedly enabled remote access to their laboratories for experimenters and they have worked in multiple initiatives involving interconnection of research test-beds either locally, across the consortium partners or at a regional, national and international scale. Examples are: Bristol Is Open (UoB), TOUCAN (EPSRC involving UoB, UoEd, UoLan), NDFIS (UoB, UCL, SOTON, Cambridge), wireless mesh networks for rural communities (UoLan) and the Ofcom whitespace trial environment (KCL), among others. Internationally, the partners have been involved in numerous Future Internet infrastructure projects such as OFELIA & Fed4FIRE (EU FIRE), FIBRE & FUTEBOL (EU-Brazil), STRAUSS (EU-Japan) and GEANT, where they have delivered test-bed infrastructure, developed experimental control and federation tools and supported user experiments. INITIATE will create an environment for delivering excellence in Internet research, educational and industrial innovation and cross-discipline interaction through experimentally driven national collaboration. The project will also support academia as well as industry and SMEs and will deliver a sustainable engagement model.