Objective 1.1 The Network of the Future
Target outcomes:
a) Future Internet Architectures and Network Technologies (Call 5)
- Novel Internet architectures and technologies enabling dynamic, efficient and scalable support of a multiplicity of user requirements and of applications with various traffic patterns, variable end-to-end quality of service, point-to-point or point-to-multipoint distribution modes, and supporting legacy and future service architectures.
The target architecture should support personalised rich media networking, machine-to-machine communication, wireless sensor networks, ad-hoc connectivity networks as well as personal and body area networks. It should also be wireless-friendly, natively support mobility, be spectrum- and energy-efficient, support future very-high-data-rate all-optical connections as well as heterogeneous wired/wireless access domains. Routing and location-independent addressing or naming, dynamic peering, signalling, resource virtualisation, and end-to-end content delivery techniques are related research issues.
- Flexible and cognitive network management and operation frameworks enabling dynamic, ad-hoc and optimized resource allocation, control and deployment, administration with accounting that ensures both a fair return-on-investment and expansion of usage, differentiated performance levels that can be accurately monitored, fault-tolerance and robustness associated with real-time trouble shooting capabilities.
The management architecture should target self-organised and self healing operations, cooperative network composition, service support and seamless portability across multiple operator and business domains. Migration paths and coexistence through overlay, federation, virtualisation and other techniques should be investigated to support several network and management architectures including legacy systems. Benchmarking capability of the proposed architecture(s) is to be considered from the onset. Clean slate or evolutionary approaches, or a mix of these, can be
equally considered.
If third country partnership is felt relevant by proposers, priority should be for those third countries having established programmes in this field, notably Japan and the USA.
b) Spectrum-efficient radio access to Future Networks (Call 4)
- Next-generation mobile radio technologies that are cost-, spectrum- and energy-efficient and adapted for implementation in future high-capacity mobile radio systems.
Key technology building blocks expected to be addressed are adaptive modulation and coding schemes, multiple antenna and user detection schemes, cross-layer design and low–latency transmission schemes. They are expected to be complemented by co-operative technologies at base station and/or terminal level, novel network topologies and related dynamic channel modelling and estimation. Integrated projects are expected to take a comprehensive approach to the key technology building blocks and develop system evolution paths by jointly designing radio transmission techniques and radio interface protocol stacks and considering spectrum coexistence and sharing.
- Cognitive radio and network technologies reducing the management complexity and enabling seamless service provision in a radio environment with a large number of heterogeneous radio access technologies.
These should support environment-aware, selfreasoning- and learning-capable mobile devices that can change any parameter or protocol based on interaction with the environment with or without network assistance.
- Novel radio network architectures enabling the innovative usage of licensed, unlicensed or unused radio spectrum with the aim of radical cost- and energy-reduction.
Target environments range from short to medium distance including systems based on femto-cells, ad-hoc networks and vehicular networks, up to wide-area terrestrial and satellite-based radio access networks.
c) Converged infrastructures in support of Future Networks (Call4)
- Ultra high capacity optical transport/access networks based on state-of-the-art photonics with transparent core-access integration, optical flow/packet transport, dynamic wavelength allocation and end-to-end service delivery capability, overcoming the limitations of segmentation between access, metro and core networks and domains, lower cost optical access and the need for energy efficiency.
Integrated projects are expected to address also a network control plane supporting flexible management capability of multi-domain and multioperator contexts with end-to-end carrier grade performance.
- Converged service capability across heterogeneous access: Breakthrough technologies and architectures for seamless ubiquitous broadband services, integrating wired and wireless, fixed and mobile technologies in hybrid access networks, including hybrid-satellite networks.
These enable generic support for service portability and continuity across composite networks through the service-network interface, with ubiquitous access from any network, from any technological or administrative domain, from any location and with a variety of access devices.
d) Coordination/ Support actions and Networks of Excellence (Call 5)
– Coordination of research efforts to explore synergies across on-going national initiatives and with third countries (priority is with the USA and Japan); support actions to channel efforts towards standardisation initiatives and a coherent approach towards take-up and testing of new concepts leading to a European-led Future Internet.
– Support to integrated satellite and terrestrial systems with a focus on supporting both public service and private communication requirements.
– Research roadmaps, organization of scientific and/or policy events, strategy and policy formulation.
– Networks of Excellence in new and emerging topics, with a clear and limited focus, requiring interdisciplinary teams of researchers.
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