The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) began the construction and operation of "StarBED" as a large-scale, general-purpose Internet simulator connected by network switches to the 512 PC servers (nodes) in 2002.

The basic concept underlying the construction of "StarBED" was that it should support research and development of the Internet by serving as a testbed that could be used to carry out multiple, large-scale simulations and provide a permanent simulation facility to be used by all the research organizations that had independently built their own as required in the past.  By making use of this testbed, the sharing, common use and recycling of facilities, tools and knowhow could be promoted and verifications could be carried out accompanied by the benefits of lower research and development costs and shorter R&D cycles.

Building on these achievements, in 2006 the mission scope was expanded into an Ubiquitous Network and, as the 2nd Phase "StarBED2," and we provide large scale verification environment of radio network based on wired network by building a testbed consisting of over 1,000 PC servers (nodes) able to verify systems in close-to-finished-product state at the binary code level.

StarBED³ was started in 2011.  In StarBED³ the mission scope was expanded into next generation network and its security and services, wired-wireless mixed network and cyber physical systems.

From 2016, the 4th project "StarBED4," started. We have built a evaluation platform for the IoT era where everyone and everything is connected to the Internet.  We have built a testbed that can evaluate not only PCs but also mobile phones, sensors, and other devices that are always close to us.  The influence of physiacl phenomena such as temperature field and electromagnetic field that connect them is also incorporated into this environment. These studies are helping to accelerate the development of next-generation products.

StarBED5 Project has the following research topics including taking over from StarBED4.

• Supporting new devices flexibly
• Dealing with new ICT systems
• Building a evaluation platform for advanced wireless systems
• Testbed platform for make a synergy with external simulators / emulators
• Supporting R&D life-cycles
• Spatial emulation surrounding IoT / CPS environment
• Benchmarking for large and complex network systems