PROJECTS

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact: Francisco Valera Pintor. Email: fvalerait.uc3m.es
Funded by: Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – MICINN)
Project Partners: Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Universidad de Vigo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Duration: December 2007 – November 2010
Description: This project focuses on common research problems and methodologies across diverse hot network technologies.  It is a joint effort by research groups of Universidad de Vigo, Universida Politécnica de Cartagena and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Specifically, we study conceptual and methodological issues (physical interface, error management, medium access, routing, traffic control, network interconnection, cross-layer interactions…) as “horizontal” aspects of “vertical” technologies (high performance switching, UMTS, wireless networks…). As a result, we establish synergies to take advantage of the experience of the partners, in order to offer solutions to problems associated with emerging technologies. Consequently, we perform our research in specific technologies but we exploit the multidisciplinary teams by setting cross-relations among those emergent technologies we are interested in, so as to solve the common scientific problems.

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact: Francisco Valera Pintor. Email: fvalerait.uc3m.es
Funded by: Spanish Ministry of Defence (Ministerio de Defensa)
Project Partners:Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Erzia Technologies, INTA
Duration: December 2011 – November 2013
Description: The project aims at evolving the data communication system of Milano (a strategic system developed by the National Institute of Aerospace Technology, INTA that performs reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition using unmanned aerial vehicles, UAV) into a next generation network that will result in substantial improvements in terms of security, robustness, reliability, scalability, flexibility and interoperability with other defence systems and a reduction in system costs.

Contact: David Larrabeiti. Email: dlarrait.uc3m.es
Project website: click here
Description: e-Photon/ONE Network of Excellence (NoE) aims at integrating and focusing the rich know-how available in Europe on optical communication and networks, both in universities and in research centres of major telecom manufacturers and operators. The set of available expertise ranges from optical technologies, networking devices and network architectures and protocols, to the new services fostered by photonic technologies. The NoE will contribute to the Strategic Objective “Broadband for All”, with a particular focus (quoting from the EC IST 2003-2004 Workprogramme, page 15) on “low cost access equipment”, “new concepts for network management, control and protocols”, and “increasing bandwidth capacity in the access network as well in the underlying optical core/metro network (including in particular optical burst and packet switching)”. The main technical focus of the NoE is to demonstrate the potential advantages of optical technologies in telecommunication networks with respect to electronic technologies. Strong cooperation among the participants to the NoE will favour a consensus on the engineering choices towards the deployment of cost-effective optical technologies in networking. This will support the future Internet, providing inputs to the standardization bodies and guidelines to the operators, as well as competitive advantages to European telecom equipment manufacturers. Integration will be pursued primarily by establishing long-term collaborations among partners in terms of research, infrastructures sharing, and education and training. The main instruments used to achieve these long-lasting collaborations are the regular exchange of researchers between partners, and the development of joint teaching programs. Dissemination will be pursued by means of coordinated publication activities, offering training programs, the organization of technical events, and interactions with other consortia in the same technical area. Research activities will mainly be carried out in research programs external to the NoE, both at the national and at the European level. Well focused technical research programs will be activated internally to the NoE.

Contact: Joerg Widmer (joerg.widmerimdea.org) and Antonio Fernández Anta (antonio.fernandezimdea.org)
Funded by:  Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – MICINN)
Duration: January 2012 – December 2014
Project partners: Institute IMDEA Networks, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Description: Recent studies reveal that ICT (Information and Communications Technology) energy consumption is becoming a significant component of the worldwide consumption.
This situation has generated a keen interest in mechanisms and methods for saving energy by telecommunication network operators, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers. Depending on the specific scenario, energy costs are a substantial cost factor, and a reduction of network and data center energy consumption provides an important contribution to cost efficiency, besides corporate social responsibility and the obvious environmental benefits.
The main objective of this proposal is the design of algorithms and techniques to reduce the energy consumption of communication systems without significantly affecting the service quality. We utilize a cross-layer approach that includes algorithms and techniques to be applied at different layers of the network architecture, with main focus on the link, network, transport, and application layers.

On the one hand, we will address the energy efficiency at the link, network, and transport layers. We will define precise energy consumption and traffic models for network elements (e.g., routers and links) in different setups, namely LAN, WAN, and data centers. These setups differ in the granularity and the time scales at which resource and energy optimization are performed. At the same time, applications like content distribution span all of these different areas, and their joint optimization is likely to lead to even better performance results. Particular care will be taken to define models that convey as much as possible the technological aspects of current and future network elements. For instance, models for new energy saving techniques, like 802.3az (Energy Efficient Ethernet), will be developed. Based on these models we will design techniques (e.g., routing and scheduling algorithms) to minimize the overall energy consumption. The performance of the developed solutions will be formally analyzed, and evaluated via simulation and testbed experiments. In addition, we will explore the potential of these and other proven techniques, originally developed for the area of networking, to also save energy in other application areas. In particular, we will explore how to save energy and/or improve the service when operating appliances and charging electric vehicles. Many of the challenges in such non-networking contexts are similar to those encountered in the communications world. Thus, exploring the application of concepts and techniques already used in communications and networks to these problems seems promising.

On the other hand, we will address the energy efficiency at the application layer with a mixture of theoretical, simulation and Internet measurement techniques. We will consider content distribution applications since they are responsible for the major portion of the current Internet traffic. In more detail, we have three independent but related objectives. First, we will design content distribution scheduling algorithms that minimize the energy wastage of the system. We will provide proof of correctness for these algorithms. Second, we aim to design an energy-efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) client for minimizing the energy consumption of the content distribution process through P2P techniques. We will validate the proposed techniques using a realistic workload generated from data collected from real P2P applications such as BitTorrent. Furthermore, we will implement a prototype of our energy-efficient P2P client and will make it publicly available. Finally, we will study the energy consumption vs.\ performance trade-off of different content distribution infrastructures (i.e., centralized vs Content Delivery Network (CDN) vs P2P) for the the distribution of User Generated Content (UGC). For this purpose, we will collect real data traces from well-known applications that owe their success to UGC such as YouTube or Online Social Networks (Facebook and Twitter) in order to generate a realistic workload to evaluate the energy wastage of the described infrastructures. As result of this study we will design a novel content distribution architecture to reduce the energy wastage of the UGC distribution.

Participating entity: Fundación IMDEA Networks and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Contact: Sergey Gorinsky (sergey.gorinskyimdea.org)
Funded by: European Commission. ICT Programme FP7
Project partners: Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecommunicazioni, Alvarion, NEC Europe, Telefonica Research, Comsys Communication & Signal Processing Ltd, MobiMesh s.r.l. , Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Science, Fundación IMDEA Networks, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Hamilton Institute of the National University of Ireland Maynooth
Duration: July 2010 – June 2013
Description: Wireless networks importance for the Future Internet is raising at a fast pace as mobile devices increasingly become its entry point. However, today’s wireless networks are unable to rapidly adapt to evolving contexts and service needs due to their rigid architectural design.

We believe that the wireless Internet’s ability to keep up with innovation directly stems from its reliance on the traditional layer-based Internet abstraction. Especially, the Link Layer interface appears way too abstracted from the actual wireless access and coordination needs. FLAVIA fosters a paradigm shift towards the Future Wireless Internet: from pre-designed link services to programmable link processors. The key concept is to expose flexible programmable interfaces enabling service customization and performance optimization through software-based exploitation of low-level operations and control primitives, e.g., transmission timing, frame customization and processing, spectrum and channel management, power control, etc.SS

FLAVIA’s approach is based on three main pillars:

• Lower the interface between hardware-dependent layers and upper layers
• Apply a hierarchical decomposition of the MAC/PHY layer functionalities
• Open programmable interfaces at different abstraction levels. To prove the viability of this new architectural vision, FLAVIA will prototype its concept on two wireless technologies currently available, 802.11 and 802.16, representing today’s two main radio resource allocation philosophies: contention-based and scheduled. Moreover, FLAVIA will assess the applicability of the proposed architecture concepts to the emerging 3GPP standards.

FLAVIA’s concept will allow boosting innovation and reducing the cost of network upgrades. Operators, manufacturers, network designers, emerging third-party solution developers, and even spontaneous end users, will be able to easily and rapidly optimize and upgrade the wireless network operation, quickly prototype and test their new protocols, and adapt the wireless access operation to emerging scenarios or service needs.

Contact: David Larrabeiti. Email: dlarrait.uc3m.es
Project website:click here
Description: Improvisa is a project of the "Tecnologías de Servicios de la sociedad de la Información (TSI) convocatoria 2005" program from MEC, carried out by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (TSI2005-07384-C03-01), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (TSI2005-07384-C03-02) and Universidad de Alcalá (TSI2005-07384-C03-03). IMPROVISA addresses the issue of real service provisioning in scenarios lacking a fixed communications infrastructure, where the cooperation between humans and electronic devices (computers, sensors/actors, robots, intelligent nodes, etc) is paramount. An example of this sort of scenario is emergency management in natural catastrophes. Technological solutions to this problem can be found in the field of ad-hoc networking. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are made up of a set of heterogeneous, autonomous and self-organising mobile nodes interconnected through wireless technologies. To date, most of the research in MANETs has focused on the design of scalable routing protocols. This project is focused on the development of real concrete application-oriented architectures, by the synergic integration of technologies covering practical ad-hoc networking, security frameworks, improved multimedia delivery, service-oriented computing and intelligent agent platforms that enable the deployment of context-aware networked information systems and decision support tools in the target scenario.

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact: David Larrabeiti. Email: dlarrait.uc3m.es
Project website: click here
Funded by: European Commission. FP7
Project Partners: AGH Univeristy of Science and Technology (Poland), Gdansk University of Technology (Poland), InnoTec DATA G.m.b.H. & Co. KG (Germany), Grenoble INP (France), MSWIA - General Headquarters of Police (Poland), Moviquity (Spain), PSI Transcom GmbH (Germany), Police Service of Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), Poznan University of Technology (Poland), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria), University of Wuppertal (Germany), University of York (Great Britain), Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic), Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia), X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H. (Austria), Fachhochschule Technikum Wien (Austria)
Duration: January 2009 - December 2013
Description: Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment (INDECT).

The main objectives of the INDECT project are:

• To develop a platform for: the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence.
• To develop the prototype of an integrated, network-centric system supporting the operational activities of police officers, providing techniques and tools for observation of various mobile objects,
• To develop a new type of search engine combining direct search of images and video based on watermarked contents, and the storage of metadata in the form of digital watermarks.

The main expected results of the INDECT project are:

• To realise a trial installation of the monitoring and surveillance system in various points of city agglomeration and demonstration of the prototype of the system with 15 node stations.
• Implementation of a distributed computer system that is capable of acquisition, storage and effective sharing on demand of the data as well as intelligent processing
• Construction of a family of prototypes of devices used for mobile object tracking,
• Construction of a search engine for fast detection of persons and documents based on watermarking technology and utilising comprehensive research on watermarking technology used for semantic search,
• Construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discussion forums, UseNet groups, file servers, p2p networks as well as individual computer systems,
• Elaboration of Internet based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive, and demonstrating its efficiency in a measurable way.

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact: Antonio de la Oliva Email: aolivait.uc3m.es
Funded by: MICINN
Project partners: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Duration: January 2011 - December 2013
Description: Current Internet has become an essential communication infrastructure, not only used for information transfer but also as a key component of social infrastructures such as e-government, energy/traffic controls, finance, learning, health, etc. Even though the Internet has evolved into such an essential infrastructure, its future application depends on how it is going to cope with several concerns on different aspects such as scalability, ubiquity, security, robustness, mobility, heterogeneity, Quality of Service (QoS), re-configurability, context-awareness, manageability, data-centric, economics, etc. Over the last years a discussion about how to overcome upcoming Internet's limitations has been initiated. From an academic point of view, one could incline for a revolutionary or clean-slate way of solving the problem by fully redesigning the overall Internet architecture. From a more practical point of view, one tends to incline for an evolution of the current Internet as it is by patching its leaks and deficiencies when trying to serve as the basis for the development of novel services demanding constricting requirements.

This project will tackle the Future of Internet from both perspectives (revolutionary and evolutionary) in order to understand the benefits and disadvantages of each approach and be able to compare them. Additionally, the project will take into account solutions thought to improve three important lacks of the current Internet: energy efficiency, heterogeneity of information and coexistence of networks. In order to do so, two technologies have been identified as potential solutions to some of these problems: i) Media Independence and ii) Virtualization. On the one hand, Media Independence enables the decoupling of physical and overlay infrastructure by introducing an abstraction layer between link and network layers. On the other hand Virtualization enables the creation of overlay networks spanning multiple technologies and realms, hence being a very useful tool for context-aware service composition.

Participating entity: Fundacion IMDEA Networks
Contact: Jaime Garcia Reinoso Email: jgrit.uc3m.es
Project website: http://www.medianet-cm.es/
Funded by: Department of Education, Regional Government of Madrid (Consejería de Educación, Comunidad de Madrid)
Project partners: NETCOM Research Group from University Carlos III of Madrid, DSA Research group from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Institute IMDEA Networks, GIST Research Group from Universidad de Alcalá de Henares.
Duration: January 2010 - December 2013
Description: This program strives for a significant scientific advance in the future media Internet where important advances are necessary to allow end-users to perceive a good quality of experience. The network technologies objectives consist of the definition and validation of new proposals for the efficient transport of high bandwidth, real-time data flows in a decentralized way where the network provides mechanisms to seamlessly request and configure devices to increase the quality of experience perceived by end-users. Furthermore, new experiences with layer 2 networks and a cross-layer design will be tested with high bandwidth demanding media services. The global result will be an integrated and independent advancement in future media Internet protocols, algorithms, switching architectures and standards.

Participating entity: Fundación IMDEA Networks and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Contact: Albert Banchs Roca (banchsit.uc3m.es)
Funded by: European Union. ICT Programme FP7
Project partners: ALCATEL – LUCENT BELL Labs France, Telecom Italia S.p.a., Portugal Telecom Inovaçao , Docomo Communications Laboratories Europe, Comsys Communication & Signal Processing Ltd. , LiveU , Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Fundación IMDEA Networks, Consorzio Ferrara Ricerche, Universita Degli Studi di Padova, EURECOM
Duration:   July 2010 – June 2013
Description:  Video is a major challenge for the future Internet. This traffic type is foreseen to account for close to 90 percent of consumer traffic already by 2012. However, the current Internet, and in particular the mobile Internet, was not designed with video requirements in mind and, as a consequence, its architecture is very inefficient when handling video traffic. It is the vision of this consortium that, as video is going to represent the majority of the traffic, the future Internet architecture should be tailored to efficiently support the requirements of this traffic type. Specific enhancements for video should be introduced at all layers of the protocol stack where needed, ideally supporting an incremental deployment.

Following the above vision, the main goal of the project is to evolve the Internet architecture for efficient video traffic support. The proposed architecture will follow a cross-layer design that, by exploiting the interaction between layers, can raise performance to values unattainable with individual developments. The following key issues will be addressed by the architecture: i) enhanced wireless access support to optimise video performance, ii) novel IP mobility architecture adapted to the requirements of video traffic, iii) transport optimisations for video distribution and iv) network-aware video services that interact with the underlying layers.

The technology developed by the project will be designed taking into account the requirements of network operators for commercial deployment, and will aim at improving the Quality of Experience by users as well as reducing the associated costs for operators. Standardization and early incremental testing are considered key success factors for MEDIEVAL.

The consortium is well balanced and combines the integrated perspectives of three mobile operators, a major manufacturer and an innovative video technology company, in addition to leading academic partners and research institutes."

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact: David Larrabeiti. Email: dlarrait.uc3m.es
Project website: Under construction
Funded by: European Commission, ICT Program FP7, Grant agreement: FP7-ICT-248606
Project Partners: FRAUNHOFER-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FOERDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG E.V (Germany), PHILIPS CONSUMER LIFESTYLE B.V. (Netherlands), INGENIERIA Y SOLUCIONES INFORMATICAS DEL SUR, SOCIEDAD LIMITADA (Spain), Clevercherry.com Ltd (United Kingdom), UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III DE MADRID (Spain), THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM (United Kingdom), FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM INFORMATIK AN DER UNIVERSITAET KARLSRUHE (Germany), BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL (United Kingdom), SEMMELWEIS EGYETEM (Hungary), AYUNTAMIENTO DE GETAFE (Spain)
Duration: February 2010 - August 2012
Description:MyUI will foster the mainstreaming of accessible and highly individualized ICT products – a major issue for e-Inclusion. The project addresses important barriers which include developers’ lack of awareness and expertise, time and cost requirements of incorporating accessibility and missing validated approaches and infrastructures. The project’s approach goes beyond the notion of Universal Design by addressing specific user needs through adaptive personalized interfaces. An ontology-based context management infrastructure will collect user  and context information in real-time during use. Sharing the collected information across several personal applications will increase efficiency and validity. The user interface will self-adapt to the evolving individual user model, in order to fit the user’s special needs and preferences. The MyUI adaptation engine will rely on empirically based design patterns for specified user and context characteristics.

Providing support for developers is a key goal of the project. Accessibility guidelines, re-usable interface components and a virtual environment for illustration, training and monitoring will support the mainstreaming of accessibility in ICT products. An interface adaptation engine and simulation tools will help developers test, assess and refine their designs. MyUI technologies will be implemented in three selected ’use cases’ to demonstrate their benefit and feasibility in industrial development contexts: interactive TV device, interactivedigital physiotherapy service, and interactive socialisation service.

Participating entity: Fundación IMDEA Networks
Contact: Jaime Garcia. Email: jgrit.uc3m.es
Project website: http://www.rediris.es/proyectos/pasito
Funded by: State Secretariat for Telecommunications and the Information Society (SETSI) of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (MITYC)
Project partners: Red.es/RedIRIS, CESCA (Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya –Catalonian Supercomputing Centre), CESGA (Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia – Galician Supercomputing Centre), CICA (Centro Informático Científico de Andalucía – Andalusian Scientific Computing Centre), the Basque academic network i2BASQUE, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the i2CAT Foundation, IMDEA Networks, Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), University of Carlos III of Madrid (UCIII), the University of Granada (UGR), the University of Murcia (UMU), the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and the University of Vigo (UVIGO).
Duration: Starting on September 2007 - TBD
Description: The platform for telecommunications services analysis (PASITO) is a distributed tests laboratory, which offers engineers the chance to construct, refine and evaluate test scenarios for telecommunication services.
The laboratory contributes to:

• Optimizing communications resources
• Designing and adapting new services to the current needs
• Certifying equipment and services

PASITO is a public infrastructure, based upon the Spanish RedIRIS academic network. It uses varied technologies to enable it to test a wide range of telecommunication services and at the same time guarantee that its activities are isolated from the rest of the academic network's services. This avoids interference with other activities that are in operation within the Spanish scientific community.
The platform’s main research areas are:

• Internet architectures
• Communication protocols
• Transport technologies with service quality
• Virtualization and autoconfiguration of networks and services
• Technologies and tools to monitor networks and services
• Optical services for intensive data projects
• Large scale information distribution technologies
• Peer-to-peer systems
• Mobility services
• Technologies to improve network security
• Standards for new generation collaboration services

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact: Carlos J. Bernardos. Email: cjbcit.uc3m.es
Project website: Under construction
Funded by: Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – MICINN)
Project Partners: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Duration: October 2009 – December 2012
Description: Vehicular communications are a reality not too far to come. Driven by the goals of improving road safety and efficiency, governments, car manufacturers and telecommunication players are working towards the definition of a geonetworking-based architecture that enables vehicles to benefit from communication capabilities. The goal is to support different types of applications: critical safety (e.g., forward collision warning), non-critical safety (e.g., traffic efficiency applications), and non-safety (infotainment or generic Internet connectivity), but most efforts have been devoted so far to standardise critical safety applications, while ensuring coexistence with other types of applications. Bringing IP connectivity to cars will also enable classical and new Internet applications to be provided in cars.
This advance will also help speeding up the adoption of vehicular communication systems by the users, since they will see an additional benefit in the installation of a communication system in their cars. In order to help this become a reality, this project focuses on the design of Quality of Service enabled IP heterogeneous vehicular networks, where two fundamental needs are identified:

a. Integration of IP into a geonetworking-based vehicular architecture. This comprises the definition of IP autoconfiguration mechanisms, as well as protocols to transport IP datagrams inside vehicular networks.

b. Support of heterogeneous wireless technologies. This includes the design and evaluation of mechanisms that efficiently and transparently support mobility across different access technologies.

This mobility support will provide the IP services through the geonetworking based architecture wherever its coverage is available. If it is not, the mobility support will select the LTE network to handover the communication, since this is an emerging 4G technology with a promising broadband access.
Finally, an experimentation test-bed will be designed and deployed. This demonstrator will be used to validate and analyse the key mechanisms designed within each of the three areas above.
Additionally, a sub-set of mechanisms will be integrated, in order to gather some insight on the operation of the integrated architecture.

 

Participating entity: NETCOM Research Group
Contact:Carmen Guerrerro. Email: guerreroit.uc3m.es
Project website: http://www.fp7-trend.eu/
Funded by: European Union. Program FP7-ICT (FP7-ICT-257740).
Project Partners:

• Politecnico di Torino (PoliTO)
• Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France (ALBLF)
• Huawei Technologies Dusseldorf GmbH (HWDU)
• Telefonica Investigación y Desarrollo SA (TID)
• France Telecom SA (FT)
• Fastweb SPA (FW)
• Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M)
• Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (IBBT)
• Technische Universität Berlin (TUB)
• École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
• Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecommunicazioni (CNIT)
• Panepistimio Thessalias - University of Thessaly (UTH)

Duration: September 2010 – September 2013
Description: TREND is a Network of Excellence, coordinated by Politecnico di Torino, funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme.
TREND aims at integrating the activities of major European players in networking, including manufacturers, operators, research centers, to quantitatively assess the energy demand of current and future telecom infrastructures, and to design energy-efficient, scalable and sustainable future networks.
The NoE will integrate and drive towards commonly agreed technical goals the many recent research efforts in energy-efficient networking, laying down the bases for a new holistic approach to energy-efficient networking, investigating effective strategies and mechanisms to reduce energy consumption in current and future networks in general, and the future Internet in particular. We aim at identifying the best answers to the following questions:

• What is the real power consumption of ICT?
• What are the means to best reduce the energy consumption of today’s networks without compromising requirements in network and service performance?
• What are the best suited engineering criteria and principles to actively support energy efficiency along the sequence of network design, planning, and operation?
• What changes in the design of network equipment are necessary in the short and long term in order to obtain the largest possible energy saving
• Which communication and management paradigms and protocols will be able to mediate and ensure the most effective distributed energy control?
• What are the most promising and sustainable long-term approaches to energy efficient networking, assuming that a clean slate network design is possible, and what are potential migration strategies to achieve this?
• What kind of mutually beneficial incentives can be proposed to network operators, service providers, and users, in order to maximize energy efficiency?

The aim of TREND is to establish the integration of the EU research community in green networking with a long term perspective to consolidate the European leadership in the field.