The research community worldwide has increasingly drawn its attention to the weaknesses of the current Internet. Many proposals are addressing the perceived problems, ranging from new enhanced protocols to fix specific problems up to the most radical proposal to redesign and deploy a fully new Internet. Most of the problems in the current Internet are rooted in the tremendous pace of increase of its use. As a consequence there was little time to address the deficiencies of the Internet from an architectural point of view. Within FP7, the European Commission has facilitated the creation of European expert groups around the theme FIRE "Future Internet Research and Experimentation". FIRE has two related dimensions: on one hand, promoting experimentally-driven long-term, visionary research on new paradigms and networking concepts and architectures for the future Internet; on the other hand, building a large-scale experimentation facility supporting both medium- and long-term research on networks and services by gradually federating existing and new testbeds for emerging or future Internet technologies. By addressing future challenges for the Internet such as mobility, scalability, security and privacy, this new experimentally-driven approach is challenging the mainstream perceptions for future Internet development. This new initiative is intended to complement the more industrially-driven approaches which are addressed under the FP7 Objective "The Network of the Future" within the FP7-ICT Workprogramme 2007-08. FIRE is focused on exploring new and radically better technological solutions for the future Internet, while preserving the "good" aspects of the current Internet, in terms of openness, freedom of expression and ubiquitous access. The FIRE activities are being launched in the 2nd ICT call, which closes in October 2007, under the FP7-ICT Objective 1.6 "New Paradigms and Experimental Facilities" (budget ε40m). Projects are envisaged to start in early 2008.

To meet the challenging key performance indicators of the fifth generation (5G) system, the network infrastructure becomes more heterogeneous and complex. This will bring a high pressure on the reduction of OPEX and the improvement of the user experience. Hence, shifting today's manual and semi-automatic network management into an autonomic and intelligent framework will play a vital role in the upcoming 5G system. Based on the cutting-edge technologies, such as Software-Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization, a novel management framework upon the software-defined and Virtualized Network is proposed by EU H2020 SELFNET project. In the paper, the reference architecture of SELFNET, which is

Media use cases for emergency services require mission-critical levels of reliability for the delivery of media-rich services such as video streaming. With the upcoming deployment of the Fifth Generation (5G) networks, a wide variety of applications and services with heterogeneous performance requirements are expected to be supported, and any migration of missioncritical services to 5G networks presents significant challenges in the Quality of Service (QoS), for emergency service operators. This paper presents a novel SliceNet framework, based on advanced and customisable network slicing to address some of the highlighted challenges in migrating eHealth telemedicine services to 5G networks. An overview of the framework outlines the technical approaches in beyond the-state-of-the-art network slicing. Subsequently, the paper emphasises the design and prototyping of a media-centric eHealth use case, focusing on a set of innovative enablers towards achieving end-to-end QoS-aware network slicing capabilities, required by this demanding use case. Experimental results empirically validate the prototyped enablers and demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in such media-rich use cases.

Network slicing has emerged as a major new networking paradigm for meeting the diverse requirements of various vertical businesses in virtualised and softwarised 5G networks. SliceNet is a project of the EU 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G PPP) and focuses on network slicing as a cornerstone technology in 5G networks, and addresses the associated challenges in managing, controlling and orchestrating the new services for users especially vertical sectors, thereby maximising the potential of 5G infrastructures and their services by leveraging advanced software networking and cognitive network management. This paper presents the vision of the SliceNet project, highlighting the gaps in existing work and challenges, the proposed overall architecture, proposed technical approaches, and use cases.

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