Advanced infrastructures are a major part of the European landscape for testing and experimentation of innovative Future Internet solutions and techniques. Over the last decade, a number of advanced infrastructures have been funded at national and European levels through a range of investments including both public (National and European ICT/e-Infrastructure) and private initiatives. The diversity and fragmentation of these investments has produced a set of heterogeneous infrastructures.

 The fragmentation is mainly due to the inherently limited technological and administrative domains and a lack of a holistic approach going beyond the technology and involving the socio-economic concerns of users, service providers and regulators. Smaller regional-level initiatives are especially prone to isolation and to duplicating other European efforts. Developing a European partnership strategy incorporating local, regional, national, international, European and indeed global interests is fundamental to increasing the competitiveness of the European Internet industry.

Although several recent initiatives such as FEDERICA, OneLab5 and Panlab federate some heterogeneous testbeds, no specific projects or efforts have been funded so far by the EC to identify the interoperability requirements needed to integrate different infrastructures and federate them according to Use Case requirements, especially at the industrial level. solutions. INFINITY will directly address this challenge by engaging key stakeholders in a mutually-beneficial capacity building.

INFINITY will follow a systematic process that will:

• identify, analyze and catalogue  existing  and emerging  advanced experimental infrastructures,
• evaluate the selected infrastructures and usage profiles
• establish a web repository that describes  available infrastructures as “living organisms”
• put in place a partnership and relationship liaison strategy  between external FI initiatives and the infrastructure owners and operators, local/regional  authorities, stakeholders and end-users
• establish interaction with public authorities  at EU, national,  regional and local levels in order to exchange information on available or planned public or public-private infrastructures and experiments.
• develop interactions with industry involved  in public/private  and private infrastructures and other experiments
• provide effective dissemination activities to advertise, spread and promote excellence of European Future Internet  research capacity and infrastructures world-wide.

A dynamic innovative repository based on a set of community-driven Web tools will be realized to promote the evolving vision of available infrastructures "as a living organism". This is supported by a methodology that will promote a consistent categorisation of the infrastructure resources, thereby facilitating a mapping between Use Case requirements and infrastructure offerings.