Inovation

Revolutionizing the Digital Landscape: The Power of SLICES in Infrastructure

Published

3 months ago

November 7, 2025

Empowering Research and Innovation in Digital Infrastructure: SLICES Leading the Way

As we navigate the complexities of building the Next Generation Internet (NGI), the digital infrastructure (DI) research community faces a significant challenge. How can we create and manage an intricate ecosystem that bridges communication, networking, distributed systems, computing, data management, and artificial intelligence (AI)?

The evolution of NGI demands a blend of existing and emerging technologies like 5G/6G wireless, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and programmable elements across various systems and networks. With the surge in data volume, coupled with the integration of AI and pervasive sensing, the need for revolutionary infrastructure designs and innovative data management approaches becomes imperative. This necessitates more experimentation and data-driven research to tackle these evolving challenges. Hence, there is a pressing need for large-scale research infrastructures to support DI investigations and ensure trust, repeatability, and accessibility for the global scientific community.

Unveiling the Significance of Research Infrastructures

Research infrastructure (RI) serves as a pivotal platform, system, or service that empowers the research community to explore, experiment, and generate knowledge collaboratively and impactfully. These infrastructures, whether physical, digital, or hybrid, are designed to provide advanced tools, platforms, and data essential for addressing intricate scientific and technological queries. At the European level, RIs stand as long-term strategic assets that uphold excellence in research and innovation across various disciplines.

SLICES emerges as a strategic RI that directly addresses the escalating complexity and interdependence of future digital infrastructures. Catering to the evolving needs of the scientific community engaged in networking, distributed systems, cloud-to-edge computing, IoT, and AI, SLICES offers the scale, flexibility, and reproducibility crucial for cutting-edge experimentation. Its inclusion in the ESFRI Roadmap since 2021 solidifies its critical role in enhancing Europe’s scientific leadership, technological autonomy, and innovation in the NGI landscape.

Enhancing Scalable and Verifiable Experimentation in DI Research

The digital communication and computer infrastructures globally rank among the largest systems ever established, evident in the sheer scale of the internet and cellular networks. The convergence of internet, computing, and networking is rapidly unfolding due to new applications and services, creating a sophisticated, interconnected digital realm that is increasingly programmable and visual. This digital ecosystem encompasses a spectrum of technologies, from data centers for cloud services to advanced wireless equipment and IoT devices for sensing and control.

A myriad of scientific domains, including physics, mathematics, and engineering, have contributed to the design, deployment, and management of these systems. Verifiable experiments are vital in these domains, representing a fundamental best practice in the discovery process. In the realm of DI, the reproducibility of experiments holds paramount importance due to the intricate, dynamic, and distributed nature of the systems under scrutiny. Without stringent control and repeatability, experimental findings lack credibility and hinder reliable validation and further development.

However, experimentation in DI research has been constrained by the limitations of commercial infrastructures or small-scale custom testbeds. The cornerstone of all research lies in repeatable, reproducible, and verifiable experiments. This necessitates complete environmental control, coupled with the capacity to scale and replicate results before deployment. In response to this necessity, SLICES is engineered to support end-to-end experimentation, enabling researchers to replicate complex scenarios with precision. It ensures consistent system states, data flows, and execution conditions – essential components for high-quality, reproducible scientific endeavors.

SLICES integrates the FAIR data management principles – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability – not only to ensure proper archiving and sharing of research data but also to foster collaborative work, reproducibility, and enduring impact. In the context of DI, where experiments often involve substantial, diverse, and real-time data, adherence to FAIR principles is foundational for achieving scientific rigor and transparency.

By embedding reproducibility, FAIR principles, and interoperability at its core, SLICES sets a new benchmark for credible and collaborative research in digital infrastructure.

Addressing Europe’s Network Research Gap

The enhancement of the current internet and 5G+ networks to support next-gen services and applications necessitates novel research and development (R&D) infrastructures and platforms. International initiatives like the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR), Fabric, Colosseum, ChameleonCloud, and China’s National Future Intelligent Network Test Facility (CENI) have been established. In this global context, SLICES-RI emerges as Europe’s concerted response to these challenges, positioning itself within a broader continental strategy aimed at reinforcing scientific collaboration and technological leadership. By fostering synergies among European Member States, SLICES bolsters the continent’s capability to act collectively in shaping the digital future.

This collaborative endeavor is not just about innovation but also about securing Europe’s digital sovereignty – the ability to autonomously design, test, and deploy foundational technologies in networking, computing, and data infrastructure without external dependencies. In this regard, SLICES plays a pivotal role in supporting the autonomy and resilience of European digital ecosystems.

To facilitate sensitive experimentation, SLICES-RI incorporates robust security and privacy mechanisms across all infrastructure levels. This includes sandboxed environments, stringent access controls, and resource isolation to ensure secure, confined testing. For experiments involving AI models, IoT sensors, or personal and contextual data, confidentiality is maintained through data anonymization, encrypted communications, and dedicated privacy-preserving protocols.

Furthermore, the platform aligns with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other pertinent European frameworks, encompassing cybersecurity directives and data governance standards. These assurances guarantee that all research conducted on SLICES adheres to the highest legal and ethical standards, reinforcing trust in the experimental outcomes.

Empowering End-to-End Experimentation in Europe

SLICES-RI (SLICES-Research Infrastructure), featured in the 2021 ESFRI Roadmap, aims to address NGI challenges by establishing the extensive infrastructure necessary for experimentation on various networking and telecommunications aspects in the post-5G/6G era. It also seeks to enable advanced research in related DI domains such as distributed systems, IoT, and federated learning (FL), integrating them within the emerging edge-cloud continuum. Through multidisciplinary experimentation, SLICES-RI offers avenues to develop innovative horizontal and vertical services.

SLICES-RI caters to the complete lifecycle management of the experimental process – from initial design to data, services, and applications – and provides essential resources to support implementation, operation, and automation.

SLICES-RI brings several benefits to the European ecosystem:

Cost-effectiveness: SLICES eliminates the need for academics and companies to invest in new equipment or develop specific internal expertise from scratch.

Neutrality: Serving as a politically agnostic, goal-independent platform, SLICES enables even competing industrial stakeholders to conduct evaluations and proof-of-concept validations in a shared, impartial environment.

Long-term sustainability: While most projects have a lifespan of three to four years, SLICES, as an ESFRI initiative, offers continuity over two decades or more, ensuring sustained experimentation and impact.

SLICES can positively influence other fields requiring DI capabilities, including remote robotics and automation, intelligent agriculture, remote medicine, and education. This can be achieved by continuously assessing the research community’s needs, identifying key research challenges at European and international levels, and tailoring its experimental offerings accordingly.

Forging Europe’s Premier Platform for Digital Experimentation

SLICES-RI aspires to emerge as the preeminent European platform for experimentation and high-quality research on digital infrastructures and services. It aims to meet the evolving needs of an increasingly multidisciplinary research community and cater to the significant demand from both the research realm and industry, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in a rapidly evolving market landscape.

Its value proposition hinges on offering users the opportunity to experiment with cutting-edge technologies, simulating a diverse array of scenarios encompassing data sensing through IoT and sensors to data processing and storage in the cloud, traversing various networks. These scenarios are pervasive across numerous verticals like Industry 4.0, smart agronomy, or remote medicine. SLICES-RI establishes a dynamic synergy between research and industry to deliver robust outcomes that drive scientific breakthroughs and innovative solutions and products for commercial markets. Researchers can test their concepts in real, flexible, and open technological environments – a DI ‘Living Lab’ – ensuring experiment reproducibility and result reliability. Concurrently, industrial users can reduce costs by testing emerging, unproven technologies, empowering them to innovate, develop new products, boost revenues, and enhance resilience to change.

This is particularly beneficial for SMEs and startups, which often encounter formidable barriers to technological innovation due to resource constraints. By accessing advanced infrastructures and support services without substantial initial investment requirements, these entities can accelerate their R&D cycles, mitigate experimentation risks, and gain expedited access to market opportunities.

In this context, SLICES-RI emerges not only as a scientific asset but also as a strategic lever for innovation, competitiveness, and technological sovereignty at the European level.

From Early Testbeds to a European Research Infrastructure

SLICES leverages the experience accumulated since 2005 through the design, deployment, and operation of several test platforms like PlanetLab Europe and EU FIRE testbeds. The initiative has been advanced through successive projects to validate its concept and pave the way for implementation.

The H2020 SLICES-DS initiative enabled researchers to outline the foundational architecture of the RI, encompassing technical prerequisites, legal frameworks, costs, and financial aspects. This endeavor was made feasible through robust support from the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program and continues under Horizon Europe, reflecting sustained institutional confidence in the enduring strategic value of SLICES.

The H2020 SLICES-SC (starting community) project initiated actions and open calls to cultivate a research community around the SLICES-RI ecosystem and strengthen ties with industrial stakeholders to bolster future commercial exploitation.

The ongoing Horizon Europe SLICES-PP (preparation phase) tackles pivotal technical queries essential for deployment, defines research blueprints for targeted domains, and supports the legal framework to transition into a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) by 2027.

Upon establishment, the ERIC will be governed by a council comprising representatives designated by participating countries, ensuring robust national engagement in strategic, financial, and operational decisions. Presently, discussions involving 16 European states are underway to construct this framework (France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Ireland, Cyprus, Hungary, Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Norway, Netherlands, Finland, and Luxembourg).

Serving a Diverse and Evolving Research Community

The SLICES-RI infrastructure caters to a vast, diverse community predominantly comprising scientists and engineers contributing to internet development and underlying technologies. Given the convergence in DI, the community now encompasses distributed computing, data science, and applied AI researchers. These experts actively engage in scientific and standardization bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), relying on these entities to disseminate their work.

Fostering Scientific Excellence in Digital Infrastructure Research

Since its inception, SLICES-RI has been driven by the vision to design, implement, and operate an extensive, interconnected infrastructure supporting experimental research in future networking, telecommunications, distributed computing, federated learning, and IoT for both horizontal and vertical applications. It underscores integration across the edge-cloud continuum, from IoT sensing and imaging at the edge to substantial cloud data centers.

SLICES’ ongoing mission is to facilitate end-to-end experimentation and reproducible research across hardware, software, and applications – encompassing data capture, processing, inference, storage, radio management in 5G/6G, and dynamic edge service deployment – while offering complete research flexibility.

Sustainability and Environmental Impact in SLICES-RI

From inception, SLICES-RI has been committed to minimizing its environmental footprint by incorporating Green IT principles into the infrastructure’s design, deployment, and operation. This entails developing a clear policy for equipment procurement and deployment to optimize energy consumption through intelligent workload orchestration, resource sharing across storage, networking, and computing, and efficient infrastructure utilization. Additionally, SLICES embraces a responsible lifecycle management approach, considering the environmental impact of equipment manufacturing, maintenance, and end-of-life processes to ensure sustainability throughout the asset lifecycle.

Simultaneously, SLICES serves as a platform to evaluate and monitor the carbon footprint of the services and experiments it hosts, equipping researchers with tools to gauge energy consumption and comprehend its environmental implications. This emphasis on sustainability aligns with the objectives of the European Green Deal and broader EU digital responsibility goals, positioning SLICES as a strategic instrument for mitigating the environmental footprint of digital technologies.

From Collaboration to Governance: Building SLICES-RI Together

Presently, the SLICES-RI consortium is collaboratively developed by 26 partners across 16 European Member States, with over 700 researchers and engineers actively contributing. Together, they are structuring the platform at national and European levels. The evolving infrastructure is anticipated to transition into an ERIC by 2027, governed by a board comprising representatives appointed by participating countries’ governments. France, as the host country and primary sponsor, is set to host the headquarters.

While demanding for all involved, the preparation phase stands as a pivotal step in establishing a resilient foundation for SLICES. The aspiration is to craft an infrastructure capable of evolving over the next two decades, anticipating and adapting to major technological and societal transformations that will define Europe’s and the world’s digital future, while upholding scientific excellence and ensuring adaptability to ongoing technological transitions.

Building Tomorrow’s Digital Infrastructure: Your Involvement Matters

SLICES-RI embodies Europe’s strategic initiative to establish a leading, open, and sustainable digital research infrastructure that empowers researchers and industry alike. By fostering collaboration, reproducibility, and innovation, SLICES is poised to shape the future of digital infrastructures and services for decades to come.