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This article presents the European FP7 Network of Excellence “Euro-NF” (Networks of the Future) and reviews its set of activities. Specific attention is paid to the concept of Specific Joint Research Projects (SJRP), a series of small but focused projects, integrating at least three Euro-NF partners and targeting joint seminal work, publications as well as full-size follow-up projects. Further to the description of the SJRP concept, a set of three selected SJRP from different areas are presented in detail with respect to motivation, goal, contents, results, and impact.

The 6th International ICST Conference on Communications and Networking in China (Chinacom 2011) was successfully held in Harbin, China on August17-19, 2011. This year’s conference continued its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of results on cutting-edge research in telecommunications and networking, bringing together Chinese and international researchers and practitioners for discussions on the latest development in information and communication technologies. The conference attracted 196 international registrants from 12 countries in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe.

The 3rd ICST Conference on Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI 2011, www.mon-ami.org) will be held in Aveiro, Portugal on 21-23 September 2011. The conference offers the opportunity to leading researchers, industry professionals and academics to meet and discuss the latest advances on mobility management, multiaccess and resource management, and network management.

Cognitive radios with their ability to dynamically access unused portions of the radio spectrum have generated a lot of interest recently. In this paper we demonstrate an experimental cognitive radio network using Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs). We have constructed a fully functional cognitive radio network with the ability to incorporate many of the requirements of a dynamic spectrum access system like the Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN). The function of spectrum sensing is studied in detail. Along with the commonly used energy detector, two wideband sensing algorithms are implemented and a collaborative sensing scheme is also presented. A simple protocol is constructed which proves to be quite effective for the cognitive radios to dynamically change their transmitter and receiver parameters accordingly. Although the focus is on spectrum sensing, the whole system is scalable to conduct extensive research in all areas of cognitive radio.

The third International ICST Conference on Personal Satellite Services 2011 (PSATS’11) was held at the Hotel Sol Principe, Malaga in Spain from the 17-18 of February 2011, jointly organized by University of Siena (Italy), University of Trento (Italy), University of Malaga (Spain), EUTELSAT (France), European Alliance of Innovation (EAI) and CERATE-NET Research Centre (Italy). The conference was also proudly supported by the European Commission’s technology platform the ‘Integral Satcom Initiative (ISI)’.

On many occasions in the past I have felt uncomfortable with the claim that we live in the era of knowledge, rationality, technology and primacy of empiricism. The source of this unease felt like a dissonance in some deeper insides of me. Postmodern philosophers prophet the decline of religion and the rise of rationality, professionalization, constant self-actualization, expert-dependence, pragmatism, dominance of market-like relationships (panmarket), cynicism and egoism, resembling a dehumanized world of characters from Philip K. Dick’s novels. One who claims we are leaving in romantic times would be considered out of mind, no doubt. Meanwhile if you type 'rational' in Google search you will get some 50 mio hits, when you write romantic you get some 200 mio hits. Of course it does not prove anything but you may find this fact curious, curious enough to consider some other clues that inspired my thoughts before it even occurred to me to make this awkward comparison. I encourage you to expand the list by posting comments below.

The Second International ICST Conference on Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI) was held in Santander, Spain on 22-24 September 2010, hosted by the University of Cantabria. Santander, a modern cosmopolitan city with a rich historical past, appealing social and cultural background, and high-quality service offerings was the perfect backdrop for the second edition of the conference. The technical program featured 29 papers, which were organized by subject in seven sessions: Routing and Virtualization, Autonomic Networking, Mobility Management, Multiaccess Selection, Wireless Network Management, Wireless Networks and, finally, a session for papers presenting Future Research Directions.