Energy is becoming a very scarce resource. Hence, a shift towards a Green paradigm is increasingly dominating all kinds of industries nowadays. Energy saving is not the only goal of the green paradigm. Reducing pollution and waste emissions, especially CO2, is among the foreseen targets. A high percentage of research efforts, in all areas of industries, is devoted to reducing the CO2 footprint. Although ICT contributes to the CO2 emission only with a low percentage, ICT is not much different.  Many research efforts have been devoted to decrease the CO2 footprint of ICT. C2POWER, an EU funded project which aims at decreasing power consumption within mobile terminals in a multi-standard wireless environment, is one of those research efforts.

Many experts today propose enhancements for the Internet. They claim that the 30-year old concept, originally designed for a handful of military bases and universities, cannot cope with today's challenges of more than a billion of participants, and new features such as VoIP, VoD, IP-TV, videoconferencing etc. Many ideas and concepts to improve the Internet have been proposed. Among the many trends which can be observed is the re-introduction of connection-oriented communication based on flows or streams, like the flow transfer mode (FTM), which has been proposed by van As.

Don’t you think that a persistent part of today’s social communication patterns is that we are aggressively attacked by buzzwords that are infinitely generated and disseminated with the intent to attract our attention? Contemporary Alladins of public relations keep using them as incantations to open the sesames’ of our minds. I’m sure you do!

Abstract—In the recent past, evolutionary applications have started to emerge, augmenting or replacing the common and often superannuated entertainment services that find everyday use. IPTV, or, providing television programming over the packetswitched Internet has been one of them; a service expecting to prostrate the simple TV broadcast, and enhance its features, using novel sets of applications, offered within the same infrastructure. This article overviews the IPTV service, analyzing its key-features as a technology, as well as the unique demands they pose. At the same time, it illuminates the wired and wireless network architectures that can facilitate IPTV service delivery, while addressing cost, reliability, and quality of service requirements. Finally, it also discusses of the IPTV issues and research areas that can further help the strong founding of the IPTV service.

CHINACOM 2010, the 5th edition of ICST’s International Conference on Communications and Networking in China, took place on 25-27 August in Beijing with the participation of over 200 international attendees, media partners and cooperating societies such as IEEE VTS, IEEE MTT-S, and IEEE CVTC.

ICaST’s new Editor-in-Chief talks about the future of the magazine and the way in which ICT is transforming the publications landscape.

The New York Times recently reported an exciting online trial of open community peer review. But this was not an experiment by one of the innovative new electronic journals — rather, it was carried out by a longstanding, prestigious publication in the supposedly-conservative humanities literature. ICaST’s co-Editor-in-Chief takes a look at how the web is transforming the way in which researchers in many disciplines share and develop their thoughts and ideas.

Network evolution towards self-aware autonomous adaptive networking aims at reducing the burden of configuring and managing networks, which leads to performance degradation. In order to optimize network operations, the introduction of self-awareness, self-management, and self-healing into the network was proposed, leading to a novel paradigm in networking — known as cognitive networking. However, such paradigm requires novel architectures to enable cooperation among network devices and across the network.

The aim of this work is to carry out a comprehensive overview of small satellite domain. Firstly, the challenges of small satellites are examined and complementary aspects of large and small satellites are discussed. Secondly, the potential applications of small satellites are described and new concepts (i.e., formation flying, constellation, cluster) specific to small satellite domain are explained. Finally, we have highlighted important ongoing and future research directions for small satellites routing, based on a study concerning routing mechanisms and topologies in sensor networks, Ad hoc networks and satellite networks.

From this ICaST issue on the magazine will feature a column on topics that bridge technology, society and culture. The editors and co-authors of this column, Mieczysław Muraszkiewicz and Jan Kaczmarek, will share it with other invited authors to trace and discuss two-way impacts between technology, society and culture at large. In their first introductory article the authors set the background for the column’s main main theme.

The ICST International Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia, was initiated in 2009 in Venice, Italy, to provide a unique international forum for researchers in the field of user-centric multimedia technologies and to improve the understanding of the changing landscape of media. The conference aims at involving all portions of the different media value chains, from creatives, through service providers, technology enablers and users/consumers, supporting inventive and creative practices in the arts, in science, in engineering and in business, encouraging publications that help to understand, to predict and to enable trends in the relationship between users and media. Technical Programme Committee Chair Cristina Costa reports from the 2010 event held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.