Focus of the meeting and Rationale

Machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions such as wearables, vehicular networks and smart homes will constitute more than a third of the total internet connections¹. These Internet of Things (aka Industrial Internet, aka Industry 4.0, …) networks are rapidly growing in complexity and continuing to extend into the personal and private domain. Fuelled by the numerous sensors interconnected, massive amounts of Big Data need to be managed, routed and processed efficiently, for instance, supported by the network edge or fog computing concepts.
These tremendous device and data amounts envisioned will be supported by the upcoming 5G wireless systems which shall support data rates of tens of megabits per second for tens of thousands of connections for massive wireless sensor networks and 1 Gb per second simultaneously. This becomes possible through mm-wave communication, flexible spectrum use, massive MIMO and Femtocells.

At the same time, networking technology is shifting towards virtualization, with Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) likely to change the infrastructure landscape. Networking paradigms are witnessing a shift from location oriented networking to content/information orientation (e.g. ICN, NDN,…). The cloud concept transforms the Internet to a network of data centers, featuring computer-to-cloud-to-computer interactions.
The potential benefits of combining the massive environmental perception based on M2M with the control power available in upcoming network paradigms is huge, as is the opportunity of number of research issues opened. Some of the pressing research issues are listed below.