The Net-Tech Future Coordination Meeting was held in Brussels, Belgium on October 23, 2014. The event was hosted by the European Commission and included two events: Cluster Meetings (research working group) and Plenary Meeting. These meetings bring together EU research-funded projects in the area of communications networks with a view to facilitating the exchange of latest research findings and of ideas for future activities.

In the Future Internet (FI) Clustermeeting around 15 representatives and interested people met to discuss the current status of the running FP7 projects. The activities of those projects within the Future Internet Cluster generally cover the broad area of Internet architectures and protocols research towards the Internet of the future, including both evolutionary and clean-slate approaches. The projects look at technical aspects, but also at economic and social implications of current and future net­working architectures. Specifically, aspects like advanced content delivery systems, measurement based management, SDN/NFV-based systems, virtualized networks and services, QoE centric management, network management, advanced Internet architec­tures, and advanced mobility support in smart networks are currently covered.

SmartenIT representative participated in the FI meeting and presented the current status of the project. The audience was very interest in information about the solution release version 1.0 and about the upcoming release 2.0. Further questions occurred concerning upcoming evaluation and test-bed setup, as well as first numbers of QoE and energy efficiency are available. Another aspect in the upcoming discussions was the link towards Internet-of-Things (IoT) and standardization activity within ITU-T and IETF. Especially people from EU project FUSION, ICT Concerto, and RITE were interested in our scenario split concerning provider and end-user issues. As an example the case of file sharing and the Tussle Analysis (i.e., ITU-T Recommendation Y.3013) was presented. Concerning the final question about what will follow after SmartenIT the audience was impressed to here that the outcomes of SmartenIT are planned to be standard-based and flexible in order to adjust them to other as can be found in the area of IoT or Cloud Computing. It was clearly pointed out by all projects that cross-layer approaches are the future.

In the afternoon SmartenIT was represented in the Plenary Meeting in which around 100 participants attended. During this event all cluster chairs presented the results of the morning session. Different calls for papers were presented where the EU commission is involved in (e.g., EuCNC). After a break a podiums discussion around the topic “Innovation infrastructures based on virtualized environments” took place with very contrary opinions. Results and minutes will be online available under https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/net-tech-future-pl soon.

Summarizing the relevant impact of the FI Cluster Meeting for the project SmartenIT it will be important for the project to announce and publish updates around the releases and evaluation in detail. A very positive feedback was received for the social-awareness aspects within the project, the supported heterogeneity of networks structure, and the successfully standardization activities. Additionally, topics like SDN, NFV, social media, virtualization, and security issues are already part of SmartenIT, which are of common interest of the FI Cluster for the future.