The Pan-European laboratory – Panlab – is based on federation of distributed testbeds that are interconnected, providing access to required platforms, networks and services for broad interoperability testing and enabling the trial and evaluation of service concepts, technologies, system solutions and business models. In this context a testbed federation is the interconnection of two or more independent testbeds for the temporary creation of a richer environment for testing and experimentation, and for the increased multilateral benefit of the users of the individual independent testbeds. The technical infrastructure that supports the federation is based on a web service interface through which available testing resources can be queried, provisioned and controlled. Descriptions of the available resources are stored in a repository, and a processing engine is able to identify, locate and provision the requested testing infrastructure, based on the testing users' requirements, in order to dynamically create the required testing environment. The concept is implemented using a gateway approach at the border of each federated testbed. Each testbed is an independent administrative domain and implements a reference point specification in its gateway.