Third parties (external experimenters) will be financed in MONROE through OPEN CALLS. The calls will be competitive and all applications will be independently evaluated based on their degree of innovation, scientific excellence and/or industrial relevance, and suitability in scale and complexity of the experiment.
There will be three classes of experimenters: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Each experimenter will be granted access to the platform for no less than 3 months and no more than 18 months. Experimenters will have the right to use a subset of the nodes for their experiments; the number of nodes to which an experimenter is granted access will be allocated by MONROE according to the experimenter’s requirements. Should scheduling conflicts arise for the access to MONROE’s nodes, the highest priority will be granted to MONROE’s partners for development and maintenance; otherwise, each class of experimenters will have a default priority, and conflicts within a class will be resolved with the goal to be fair to the experimenters. However, scheduling details will be defined in the project, and scheduling parameters will be chosen to reflect experimenters’ requirements. In general, for what concerns resource allocation to experimenters, the following guidelines will be used:
- Bronze experimenters will have access to basic measurement tools only, and for no more than 6 months. In case of node scheduling conflict, Bronze experimenters will be allowed to use platform’s nodes with the lowest priority.
- Silver experimenters will access the platform to collect results of passive and active measurements. They will have access for no more than 12 months. In case of scheduling conflict, they will be allowed to use platform’s nodes with medium priority.
- Gold experimenters will access full platform’s features for no more than 18 months. They will be allowed to run active/passive measurements as well as propose protocol experiments, which require active traffic generation and SW support from their MONROE patron. In case of scheduling conflict, they will be allowed to use platform’s nodes with high priority.
The experimenters that are selected during the first open call will have access to the prototype system and they are expected, as their contribution, to provide feedback that will be used to refine the platform to its final version. Therefore, Gold experimenters will be given larger share since their wide range of experimental needs will provide very valuable feedback to MONROE. The first call will target a small number of Bronze and Silver external experimenters (1-3 Bronze, and 1-3 Silver), and 7-10 Gold experimenters.
In the second open call, a larger number of experimenters will be recruited and given access to the full ready MONROE system (4-8 Bronze, 4-8 Silver, and 4-8 Gold experimenters).