© Datacom Industry Association 2026

DIA Open Challenge Fund

The DIA Open Challenge Fund (OCF) aims at utilising private funding to facilitate collaboration between industry and innovative SMEs and academic members of the DIA to complement identified public funding opportunities.
The main objectives of the OCF are:

  • Enabling joint R&D activities between industry and academia with the purpose of advancing the state-of-the-art of Datacom technologies in relation to their applicability in the many verticals industries
  • Enabling industry members to propose challenges that align with their work requirements and problems they face
  • Provide useful input into at least one of the active DIA Working Groups and themes

Call Identifier: OCF-OC1-Challenge1
Call Title: Enhancing Overall Network Throughput Under Mixed Per-Packet and Per-Flow Load Balancing Traffic
Final Submission Deadline: 15.12 2025 (extended!)
Notification of the Result: 15.01.2026

download call pdf

Call Identifier: OCF-OC1-Challenge2
Call Title: AI Agent for IPv6 Education, Deployment & Operations
Final Submission Deadline: 15.12 2025 (extended!)
Notification of the Result: 15.01.2026

download call pdf

Call Identifier: OCF-OC1-Challenge3
Call Title: Enhance AI clusters resilience and reactivity to data-plane failures by leveraging on sparse in-network resources (e.g. memory and compute limited switches).
Final Submission Deadline: 15.12 2025 (extended!)   
Notification of the Result: 15.01.2026

download call pdf

Call Identifier: OCF-OC1-Challenge4
Call Title: Multimodal AI Inference Traffic Scheduling and Performance Optimization.
Final Submission Deadline: 15.12 2025 (extended!)
Notification of the Result: 15.01.2026

download call pdf

Call Identifier: OCF-OC1-Challenge5
Call Title: New Paradigm for Constructing Unified Data Traceability Graphs.
Final Submission Deadline: 15.12 2025 (extended!)
Notification of the Result: 15.01.2026

download call pdf
Eligibility
  • Applicant/PI must be part of a DIA (full or associate) member
  • Applicant must be an SME or academic/research organisation
  • Applicants must have a self-directed research position with a title of any rank of professor, research scientist, postdoc or equivalent
  • Applicants must show support from their employer to participate in the program. Employers need to approve the proposed time and resources required from their employees. This could be done by running the application through the university research office.
  • Applicant’s organisation must agree to no more than 10% overhead
Funding and Contracting
  • The proposer indicates the level of funding (e.g., 25k, 50k, 100k, 200k € per challenge)
  • The DIA contracts the funding recipient
  • The deliverables must provide open results
  • The DIA will retain copyright of the document deliverables
  • The funding recipient will retain the Intellectual Property (IP)
Selection Committee

The Selection Committee reviews and approves challenges to be published on the DIA website. It consists of DIA members appointed by the DIA Board. Any DIA member can apply via email to become a Selection Committee member. The term of renewal/limitation is of one year.

The current Selection Committee consists of:

  • Sebastian Troia (Politecnico di Milano)
  • Daniel Corujo (ITAV)
  • Jens Finkhaeuser (Interpeer)
  • Marco Martalo (Unica)
  • Michela Meo (Polito)
  • Giuseppe Aceto (Uni Naples)
  • Charalampos Haris Rotsos (Lancaster Universtiy)
  • Zhang Liang (Huawei)
  • Pietro Cassara (CNR)
  • Vítor Vieira (Inova)
  • Mohammed Al-Khalidi (Essex University)
  • Samyuktha Indrasena (Fortiss)
Application forms

The application process is now closed.

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© Datacom Industry Association 2026