The National Dark Fibre Facility (NDFF) will provide the UK National Research Facility for dark fibre network research. A dark fibre network is a communications network, where it is possible to access and control the network at the optical layer, Layer1 (physical layer) in the seven layer Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model of communications networks which underpins the internet. NDFF will be a new, fully remotely configurable, flexible and high capacity research facility, building upon the success of the National Dark Fibre Infrastructure Service (NDFIS1) dark fibre network (2013-2018). This will allow UK universities and their industrial collaborators to develop and demonstrate future networks which require access to or control of the optical layer (OSI Layer1). NDFF will comprise: 1. A dark fibre network of scale sufficient for experiments representative of real-world applications (>600 km). Users will be able to connect their equipment directly to the installed fibres and control the optical layer, allowing experiments on new techniques, such as quantum encoded data, adaptive spectrum slicing and Software Defined Networks (SDN). 2. User experiment areas at multiple access nodes to interface directly with NDFF dark fibre. Interconnection for traffic generation and experiment control will also be possible UK-wide at Layer2 through services such as Janet Netpath. 3. Remotely programmable amplifiers, switches and dispersion compensation modules which will enable the transmission characteristics of the network to be varied and will allow dynamic configuration of the network topology by users. 4. Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) to split optical channels into separate optical fibres (or merge them into one fibre). A Flexgrid WSS gives user defined channel widths, enabling research on new utilisation models for the optical spectrum, increasing available logical topologies and allowing concurrent experiments using different optical wavelengths. 5. A remotely configurable Layer2 and above network to enable research into dynamic and intelligent network management. 6. An SDN and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) research platform for UK researchers, enabling them to upload network policies directly, monitoring and manipulating the optical properties of the network. UK researchers will be able to develop and test networks having optimised latency, traffic grooming, energy consumption or security properties. 7. A distributed processing infrastructure by linking sites that host servers, storage, memory and sensing. This will provide opportunities to study distributed Cloud and Fog infrastructures connected by high capacity reconfigurable optical networks. It will also provide nerve nodes that can perform network analytics offering users a new level of network programmability and adaptation. 8. The ability to test concepts in network security and resilience across all seven OSI model layers, something that is impossible with other networks. This is of particular importance as networks are starting to introduce software control and flexibility at Layer1, creating new security and resilience challenges for network control. 9. Training using dedicated research and technician support. Administration, user interface and dissemination will be the responsibility of a dedicated facility manager. In order to achieve the full potential of the facility, it is crucial to engage with the UK research community and promote the service. NDFF will engage in UK and international meetings and will bring together users at an annual user day. Web-based interfaces with users and potential users will be further developed.

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.