The European Commission (Programme IST-FET) and the US National Science Foundation (CISE-NSF division) have initiated a series of strategic research workshops to identify key research challenges and opportunities in Information Technology. On the European side, ERCIM solicited ideas for high-level workshops from the European IT scientific community. Based on the over 350 suggested topics, the Strategic Workshop Review Committee selected the areas for joint research initiatives according to the following criteria:

• long-term/high risk nature of the research involved, justifying risk sharing at international level
• high potential payoffs both in the EU and the US that make up for the long-term/high risk nature of research
• existence of sufficient scientific and technological bases in both the US and the EU to entail balanced research efforts.

A number of workshop reports us available at ERCIM page

  IETF  is  engineering   solutions   for   operational Internet to ensure its further growth and usage. The guiding  principle  the Internet architects are preserving is known as End-to-End  (E2E)  principle; it  attempts   to   facilitate   innovation   by   rejecting   [unnecessary] functionality placement within the network. However  all-purpose  deployment of the Internet that started in  early  1990s  has  greatly  challenged  the dominance of the  E2E  principle.  Significant  amount  of  IETF  effort  is currently  devoted  to  non-E2E  engineering,  such  as  firewalls,  network

address (NAT) and protocol translators (PT),  and  to  their  traversal,  to signalling, transport and content caching proxies,  etc.  The  largest  ever attempt to fix the Internet model was undertaken by IPng  working  group  in standardising IPv6, that however is currently need itself multiple fixes  to meet the reality challenge  (multi-homing,  mobility,  QoS,  midcom,  etc.). Emerging understanding among Internet users and designers is  that  IPv6  is just another addressing realm, while in future networking  reality  the  co-existence of multiple addressing realms is mostly probable.

Despite the E2E, more than 20 years of IETF engineering for the  Quality  of Service resulted in bringing and keeping more  state  (intelligence)  within the Net that is probably comparable with that of Intelligent Networks.  This intelligence needs management, often by complex  multi-layer  architectures. The IETF  approach  to  simplify  management  is  based  on  policy,  which,

multiplicity of communication technologies that will challenge  further  any rigid design. The initiative will try to project existing  usage  scenarios  and trends, especially in separation of naming and addressing architectures,  in co-existence of heterogeneous networking realms, and  in  emergence  of  new types of communication, such as those facilitated  by  sensor  networks  and ambient intelligence. A very strong emphasis will  be  made  on  fundamental research in policy-based networking. In its  current  incarnations  such  as security  policy  (access  control)  and  device  configuration   (for   QoS provisioning) the policy  mechanisms  lack  a  number  of  needed  features, namely  controlled  interaction  of  policies,  multiplexing   of   policies originated  by  multiple   communication   stakeholders   (user,   provider, operator, content, and their network side proxies) and their  automatic  and autonomous embedding into respective functionalities in  a  safe  (conflict-free) and secure way. AC shall also study  self-organisation  of  ontology

   DARPA   neXt   Generation    (XG)     communication program is developing the technology to allow  multiple  users to share use of the spectrum through  adaptive  mechanisms  that  deconflict users in terms of time, frequency, code, and other  signal  characteristics. DARPA's goals are to enable an increase of a factor of ten in the  usage  of typical spectrum. The key technologies are  centred  on  autonomous  dynamic spectrum utilization function that is surrounded by four support  functions, namely sensing (real-time low power wideband  monitoring),  characterization (rapid wafeform determination), reaction (formulate best course of  action), and adaptation (transition network  to  new  emission  plan).  Opportunistic frequency sharing is planned to achieve by imposing policy  (e.g.  rules  of frequency, time to vacate, maximum power, maximum transmit  time,  etc.)  on all users. The policies will define a set of abstract  behaviours  currently deployed manually by spectrum managers. 

behaviours, where rules governing behaviours are  not  well  understood  and inter-relations  between  elements'  behaviours  are  not  as  clear  as  in frequency sharing.

   IRTF  is a research branch of the IETF, in a number  of its semi-closed working groups it attempts to find long-term solutions for  long-standing problems. The one closely related to multiple addressing realms  was recently created (and closed in 2004) Searchable Internet Resource  Names  (SIREN)  group.  SIREN wanted to seek a tractable  option  of  enhancing  existing  Domain  Name System (DNS) with  layers  above  to  allow  "directory-like  search  (using qualified natural language strings rather than names)". It seems that similar target has yet another research group Host Identity Protocol though having more pragmatic scope - to standardise de-coupling of names and locators; the practical proposal is to use public key as a name part and map it to [any] routable address. Similar group exists within IETF.

The approach of AC will be more  radical  and  shall  largely  follow  the recently published Plutarch abstraction that is not IPv4 or IPv6  centric but is rather considering existing Internet as  yet  another  though  widely deployed realm (or explicit network 'context')  existing  concurrently  with e.g.  sensor  networks,  delay-tolerant  networks,  etc..  Mentioned   above

directory-like search will not be limited to  a  single  address  allocation authority (name registrar) but will be performed in a group  fashion,  where potential network contexts  will  return  their  values,  and  after  host's selection a needed chain of  network  contexts  will  be  established.  AC should try to extend even this radical model by allowing this  selection  to be done by intermediaries located within network context different from  the one of a resolver, thus allowing not only E2E network  context  transparency but also the inside-out one.

   DARPA NewArch  project has defined a number  of novel paradigms and constructs to meet the challenges of  current  Internet; they include FARA - innovative addressing architecture, NIRA -  new  routing architecture for the Internet, RBA - role-based architecture..

Defined as research proposals NewArch papers will be sourced for  AC  work on architectural principles  and  concepts;  however  ACCA  will  not  limit investigation of NewArch proposals only  to  IP-based  networks,  it  rather shall  evaluate  their  potential  for  more  generic  research  on   future communication paradigms.

   W3C is global organisation for the development  of  the World Wide Web with the vision of 'Semantic Web', where web  sites  will  be able  based  on  meta-data  definitions   to   perceive   the   meaning   of communication  and  to  self-organise  to  perform  complex  and   composite functionalities. The W3C is making a set of specifications  that  are  being already  used  not  only  for  pure  communication  but  e.g.  for  workflow management and system integration.

AC will capitalize on  the  work  of  W3C  and  possibly  contribute  with communication specific adaptation of  semantic  web,  where  semantics  will take a form of network and communication session contexts. Special attention will be paid to WS-CDL, choregography defeinition language (draft specification is published by W3C in May 2004); AC will be interested not only in specifying choregographies but also in understanding how network should itself compute them.

   WWRF   is    a    global    forum coordinating research for next  generation  wireless  communication.  Within WG3 'cooperative and ad-hoc networks' a number  of  white  papers  has  been produced  addressing  research  challenges  and  approaches  of  cooperative networking  (CoNet),  i.e.  inter-working   of   networks   with   different communication technologies and business models. Recently (December  2003)  a special interest group (SIG3) 'Self-organisation in wireless-world  systems' has been created within WWRF. SIG3 has to  define  its  vision  and  charter until the WWRF 11th meeting (Fenbruary, 2004), while CoNet  plans  to  issue another white paper on approaches to meet identified research challenges.

AC will collaborate through its participants that are  WWRF  members  with both groups and shall contribute its findings for comments from  members  of the WWRF.