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Researchers and educators in computer science and other domains are increasingly turning to distributed test beds that offer access to a variety of resources, including networking, computation, storage, sensing, and actuation. The provisioning of resources from their owners to interested experimenters requires establishing sufficient mutual trust between these parties. Building such trust directly between researchers and resource owners will not scale as the number of experimenters and resource owners grows. The NSF GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation) project has focused on establishing scalable mechanisms for maintaining such trust based on common approaches for authentication, authorization and accountability. Such trust reflects the actual trust relationships and agreements among humans or real-world organizations. We describe here GENI's approaches for federated trust based on mutually trusted authorities, and implemented via cryptographically signed credentials and shared policies.

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Researchers worldwide are increasingly turning to future Internet and distributed cloud (FIDC) testbeds, where they can conduct networking, distributed computing, and cloud computation experiments in a distributed laboratory setting. This brief survey of FIDC testbeds and sample applications is intended to introduce important concepts and to present example applications to pique the interest of experimentalist researchers and educators who are potential users. These testbeds are exemplified by the GENI project, which spans over forty university campuses in the US, and the FIRE initiative in the EU. They operate by virtualizing both computational and networking resources, permitting experiments that are not possible in today's public Internet or commercial cloud services. By virtualizing computation, network, and storage resources, many researchers can work simultaneously and independently within a shared cyberinfrastructure environment and extend their reach to real end users. As a result, studies that were previously confined to analysis, simulation, or execution in a single researcher's laboratory are more often conducted as experiments in real or realistic environments. This trend brings clear benefits for experimental fidelity, as well as challenges for experiment design. Four specific use cases of experimental research in GENI and FIRE are examined, including CloudCast's cloud-based localized weather forecasting; MobilityFirst, a clean-slate future Internet architecture; NetServ, an architecture for in-network services; and a study of resilience in OpenFlow software defined networks. Educational applications of these testbeds are also discussed, as are future trends toward international federations of testbeds. The Internet Innovation ProblemStandardization of basic underlying protocols such as the Internet Protocol (IP) has enabled rapid growth and widespread adoption of the global Internet. However, standardization carries the attendant risks of reducing variability and slowing the pace of progress. Validation and deployment of potential innovations by researchers in networking, distributed computing, and cloud computing are often hampered by Internet ossification, the inertia associated with the accumulated mass of hardware, software, and protocols that constitute the global, public Internet [1]. Researchers simply can't develop, test, and deploy certain classes of important innovations into the Internet. In the best case, the experimental components and traffic would be ignored; in the worst case, they could disrupt the correct behavior of the Internet. Cloud computing researchers confront a similar dilemma. In order to maintain uniformity and efficiency in their data centers, commercial cloud providers generally do not provide "under the hood" controls that permit modification to the underlying network topology or protocols that comprise the cloud environment.A clear example of the challenge is apparent to anyone tracking the pace of adoption of IPv6, a relatively modest revamping of IP. Becaus...