Today starts  the Future Network and MobileSummit 2010 in the Historical City of Florence (6 - 18 June 2010). This is the nineteenth in a series of Annual Conferences supported by the European Commission, which regularly attracts over 600 delegates from industry and research to share experiences and research results, identify future trends, discuss business opportunities and identify opportunities for international research collaboration under the ICT Theme of Framework Programme 7 (FP7). It will thus contribute to showcasing European research in the field, and position it within the multiplicity of related initiatives supported in other regions of the world.

In the context of convergence, the 19th Future Network and MobileSummit will address the challenges of building the Future Internet, based on mobile, wireless and fixed broadband communications infrastructures. SWIFT's participation in this event will be very high because, among all members,  will be presented five papers, such as " Security and Privacy Enablers for Future Identity Management Systems", " A Framework for Model-Driven Proposal and Evaluation of TABAC Strategies" or "A 3GPP open-ID Framework"

Supported by the European Commission and eMobility, the reputation of the Future Network and MobileSummit (previously known as ICT-MobileSummit) is based on high quality networking, plenary sessions that discuss strategic issues in core thematic areas and paper sessions that showcase original results in all areas of mobile, wireless and fixed broadband communications systems and networks.

On the 10th and 11th of March 2010, SWIFT participated in the ETSI Future Network Technologies Workshop in Sophia Antipolis, France. The event gathered over 200 experts from all over the world to discuss topics around Future Networks and their impact / fast track in standardization. Once the stage was set by speakers from ETSI, the European Commission and from NICT in Japan, several projects, standards organizations, companies and individuals presented their findings on Network Virtualization, Content-Centric Networking, Network Management, Autonomic Systems and Future Internet Architectures.

The discussion was particularly interesting since it dealt not only with "Future Internet" but with "Future Networks". The latter topic is many times ignored as networks are simply expected to follow the natural development of the Internet. This forum brought together experts from both sides not interested only on the service but also on a full top-down integration of all aspects of the service. Needless to say that SWIFT results, and in particular some which were presented as part of the ETSI ISG INS presentation, fit right in. Security and Identity Management were right at the top of the list of topics which must be address should such a vision of Future Networks / Internet come to life.

At the end of the workshop, the discussion focused on whether some of the work presented was mature enough for standards. Beyond the technology perspective of maturity, the debate focused on how committed the participants' companies were to the task of standardizing these protocols. As we know, without strong business motivation it is often difficult to get the support and endorsement of companies crucial to get standards through. Also, since for most of these topics no market has been established, it is hard for these players to define alliances and strategies. Overall the discussion was interesting but lacked a decisive conclusion, which is only normal since this was the first on the list of what we would expect will be many events of this sort. The road to standards in Future Internet is just beginning and we have a long way to go.

Presentations at the Workshop may be found here. 

At the Future Internet Assembly in Valencia , Spain, Amardeo Sarma, Technical Project Manager of the SWIFT project, gave a presentation on the need for a  Sustainable Identity Framework for the Future Internet. This is the result of a series of workshops and meetings between several EU projects besides SWIFT, such as PRIMELIFE, TAS3 and PICOS, and other interested experts. Technically, a central issue was ensuring privacy and control of released data while moving towards a cross-layer and cross-purpose application of identity technologies. The presentation was a consensus view developed among the experts well beyond the SWIFT project.