FEDERICA (Federated E-Infrastructure Dedicated to European Researchers Innovating in Computing network Architectures) is a project funded by the 7th EU R&D Framework Programme, through which several national academic and research networks and public and private R&D centres will create a virtual network infrastructure at European scale that may be used to carry out experimental activities on new Internet services and protocols.

The FEDERICA network will be deployed over the multi-gigabyte infrastructure of the national academic and research networks and Géant2 pan-European network. On this basis, new electronic service research groups will be able to control virtual network segments, including new virtual nodes that will be assigned to them and access networks.

The project, in addition to deploying this virtual infrastructure for researchers, also includes internal research work to develop solutions for the supervision, management and control of parallel virtual networks in a multi-domain management environment in which diverse agents control different parts of the infrastructure.