The European Union is presently funding collaborative research and development activities in the 6th Framework Programme (FP 6) that has covered the period of 2002- 2006. Activities in the communications field have made significant progress towards advanced communication technologies, systems and services enabling low cost broadband end-to-end connectivity and seamless mobile and wireless access solutions across a range of heterogeneous network infrastructures. Currently the European Commission is starting to implement the 7th Framework Programme (FP 7) that will cover the period of 2007-2013. The area of communication technologies is characterised by the main technical objective of "ubiquitous and unlimited capacity communication networks". Activities are expected to aim at ubiquitous access over heterogeneous networks - fixed, mobile, wireless and broadcasting networks - spanning from the personal area to the regional and global area allowing the seamless delivery of ever higher volumes of data and services. The presentation will first introduce the political context of research on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in general and more specifically of research on future communication networks. After the presentation of the current research portfolio in FP 6 covering ongoing activities and achievements, the rationale and content of the FP7 Work Programme and the first call for proposals in this area will be presented. This will cover the research challenges, the identified research topics and the expected impact of these activities.

The miniaturization of computing devices and advances in wireless communication and sensor technology have been pushing computing from the stationary desktop to the mobile outdoor. It is now possible to build radios and exceptionally small devices that can be deployed in a network of nodes to sense fields and forces in the physical world providing dense monitoring of physical phenomena, processing and communicating collected information, and coordinating with other nodes. Combining these capabilities with the Internet will advance many sophisticated scientific and technological pursuits while supporting improvements in various areas of application, such as manufacturing, agriculture, construction, transportation, biomedicine, education, and organizational workflows in general. To realize the promise of sensor networks, a number of challenging issues must be addressed.

Digital home experience is to be boosted by up coming high speed connectivity. The Home Area Network (HAN) is seen as a new convergence locus where connectivity technologies will complement or compete to provide very high data rate and low latency services at home. This paper introduces future trends in HAN, elaborates the requirements of this coming convergence and proposes new research topics.

Without a sense for too much detail one might be inclined to believe that standard 3GPP in its version called Long Term Evolution (LTE) in its substantial elements is quite close to what is known as standard IEEE 802.16e (WiMax). Similar, differences between LTE and other more advanced concepts for cellular mobile broadband systems resulting from FP 6 research "Beyond 3G" are not very clear to many. The panel will contribute to make the differences between the systems more clear: Besides the current state of standards at 3GPP/LTE and at IEEE 802.16e,j,m, technical differences will be highlighted and the current research towards B3G will be presented and discussed. Spectrum issues and operations conditions relevant in the context of IMT-Advanced systems will also be addressed.

Cognitive Radio, Cognitive Networks, Cognitive Radio Systems… These technologies have the potential to revolutionize wireless communications just as the PC revolutionized computing. According to IEEE, the Cognitive Radio is a radio transmitter/receiver that is designed to intelligently detect whether a particular segment of the radio spectrum is currently in use and to jump into (or out of) the temporarily-unused spectrum very rapidly without interfering with the transmissions of other users. Cognitive network generally addresses the future network being able to sense the radio environment (sensing the radio context, service context, location context and user context), automatic reasoning (interpreting the radio environment), self-actuating (reacting to the changes), self-tuning (tuning the radio and implementation parameters) and self-healing (fault management). The involved functional entities will distribute themselves over the radio subsystem, O&M subsystem and switching subsystem of the future telecommunication network. One of the primary goals is to increase the spectrum efficiency and decrease the CAPEX and OPEX. This panel will address the opportunities and challenges for the introduction of cognitive systems in the commercial and military domains. Different perspectives will be brought from the Panelists from the research, business, product, standardization and regulatory sides.