Background and Drivers
Today’s communication systems, going beyond the user-facing Internet, are built on a system of systems vision as a continued foundation for the digital communication fabric (DCF) that transcends the industries and aspects of life that form the future connected society.
Objectives
The SET WG targets research towards the architectures that realize the system of systems vision of the digital connected fabric for future cross-vertical communication and the key enabling concepts and technologies.
The group will undertake activities within the following areas:
challenges and roadmapping to identify future work and trends
architectures, policies, and techno-economics to outline the technical and societal frameworks for building and understanding new communication systems
practises and solutions to address key non-functional requirements around resilience, security, and sustainability
technologies and solutions, e.g., to AI, routing, transport, traffic steering, identification, and others
Themes and Activities
The SET WG will undertake the following activities, subject to revision, including addition of new themes and activities, in a future re-chartering of the WG.
Key to sustained research and development into the key technologies of future digital communication systems is the identification of challenges, brought by insights into existing systems, identification of new use cases, and key constraints set by technological solutions and requirements alike. It is important to outline those challenges and their drivers in a suitable manner that allows for (a) linking into the roadmapping exercises in the many funding initiatives at European and national level and (b) identify possible R&D efforts, including the suitable parties to execute those efforts. Like technologies and solutions for digital communication evolve, so will the challenges to improve on them. For that reason, this theme needs to undertake suitable efforts to not just identify but also update challenges as a continuous exercise.
For this, the following activities are planned as a recurring effort:
Roadmapping is a key theme that provides input into the various research agendas (RAs) that form the basis for EU and national level funding decisions and formation of funding calls in areas relevant to DIA members. The theme will build on the positive experiences made in positioning key DIA topics into the 2024 version of the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for the SNS JU but also going beyond this specific funding initiative by identifying other relevant EU and national level funding initiatives, particularly those maintaining research agendas a regular instrument for decision making. Key part of the identification is outlining the possibilities for contributing to research agendas, e.g., by virtue of joining a suitable expert or lobby group. Once those initiatives and routes for contributions have been identified, this theme will coordinate the suitable contributions by liaising with the appropriate DIA members but also by increasing awareness of RA activities as well as actively soliciting contributions.
For this, the following activities are planned as a continued effort with a lifecycle or one or two years (depending on the cycle of RAs).
Designing and building communication systems across the many limited domains that our vision of a system of systems is built upon requires an architectural thinking to ensure the extensibility, resilience, reliability, and security required for future use cases to come. For this, the architecture theme establishes a discourse on architecture concepts and principles that consider the requirements and constraints introduced by our vertical WGs, while being grounded into the long-standing research in this space, e.g., on recursive architectures, information-centric paradigms and narrow waist arguments, leading to concrete recommendations that will help design, implement but also reason over in the techno-economic domain. Furthermore, the theme will explore novel approaches to compose and orchestrate different architectural frameworks towards effort to deliver Network-of-Networks (NoN) systems.
For this, we plan activities that bring together work and positions in this space for an initial discussion, later complemented by vertical industry insights through linking to the emerging vertical WGs in the DIA.
Activity: Organise event on Architectures for future Digital Communication Fabric, bringing in different views on key architectural aspects, concepts, and approaches
Outcome: Speaker Series
Champions: C. Rotos, D. Hutchison (Lancaster University)
There are many policy-related aspects of interest to the DIA and its members. While we expect this theme to increasingly take on key issues, e.g., related to the Digital Services Act and the important topic of European Digital Sovereignty, the initial focus will lie on building a DIA position on SW governance in a world of ever more softwarized components and proliferation of many SW platforms into key communication components.
For this, a concrete initial activity will aim at developing the Open Source Policy position of the DIA, from which other activities are likely to follow.
Activity: Development of an Open Source Policy position for the DIA, arguing for the appointment of a DIA OSPO (open source policy officer)
Outcome: Whitepaper
Champion: J. Finkhaeuser (Interpeer)
Communication systems have proven to be essential to society’s functioning; this was acutely evidenced during the Covid-19 pandemic when much of daily life–work and social–moved online. There are several large-scale shocks that can affect the resilience of essential communication systems, which previously might have been thought of as rare but are becoming more frequent. These include natural disasters, weather-based disruptions and cyber-attacks. Moreover, geo-political instabilities can affect the resilience of communication systems. These “macro-scale” challenges sit alongside more “micro-scale” concerns, such as intermittent link failures, that adversely affect Quality of Service (QoS).
In this fast-changing world, a concrete initial activity will be to develop an understanding of the resilience concerns across sector verticals, taking both a near and medium-term view. This should consider both macro- and micro-level concerns and examine what role technology innovation can play in improving resilience (or otherwise).
Activity: Development of a roadmap of resilience challenges that can inform DIA activities on significant concerns of its membership
Outcome: Whitepaper
Champions: P. Smith, D. Hutchison (Lancaster University)
Security is a fundamental requirement for any future data communication system and a persistent challenge in existing and legacy systems. It encompasses a broad spectrum of essential features, including resilience, privacy, and protection against malicious threats. The evolving cybersecurity landscape has revealed a continuously expanding range of attacks, targeting both end systems via network vectors and the underlying network infrastructure. To solve these problems a range of approaches are required, from security-by-design before deployment, through good operational security in deployment and to state-of-the art detection and mitigation approaches to deal with attacks. Security was an early adopter of AI for detection and mitigation systems and this theme will continue this work. Additionally, it will support security for AI systems which are predominantly network based systems.
This theme will address these critical security concerns from a network-centric perspective, driving new initiatives to enhance the security of emerging protocols and architectures. While the primary focus will be on data communication security, collaboration with the broader cybersecurity community will be key, recognizing that network security is only one aspect of a larger ecosystem.
A recurring pattern in cybersecurity is that previously state-of-the-art defences often become inadequate in future settings. To mitigate this, it is crucial to design security mechanisms that are adaptable and extensible as new threats and protective technologies emerge. This theme will explore strategies for embedding security in a way that ensures long-term resilience. A key aspect of this initiative will involve working with specific vertical domains to evaluate how next-generation security solutions can safeguard both current and future systems within their operational contexts.
Artificial Intelligence is a toolbox of methods ranging from expert systems over agent-based frameworks to the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs). From a DIA perspective, the use of AI for improving on data communication solutions is equally of interest as the (data communication) solutions needed to efficiently implement the ever growing models for various AI solutions.
While there are numerous activities and initiatives targeting the AI space, we see three critical viewpoints where the DIA can add significant value to the discussion: Firstly, the access to and provisioning of relevant data that stem from the (often vertical industry focussed) application areas where the derived LLM shall be applied. The value that the DIA can bring to this aspect is the linkage to various vertical industries (through its to-be-established WGs) and the possible awareness that the data challenge provides, while also working on concrete methods and mechanisms to unlock this data and its potential use in AI-based methods. Secondly, key to unlocking the (vertical industry) data value and its potential use is the formulation and understand of best practises, capturing not just the data aspect but also the possible conduct of AI research and solution development, the governance of results, the appropriate capturing the (often significant) investment in computational resources to obtain the desired results. Bringing the vertical and horizontal solution stakeholders to the table, together with the academic community is a key value and contribution of the DIA in developing such best practises. Thirdly, with the development of novel AI solutions in a number of key initiatives, such as in the European HPC efforts, a crucial contribution of the DIA lies in the identification and development of AI-based Apps, i.e., concrete solutions that utilize AI methods towards a concrete problem that is relevant particularly to vertical industries. Utilizing the “application” abstraction here places the emphasis on the use case and problem, not the specific AI method utilized for its realization. The linkage between the SET WG and the relevant vertical WGs is key here for this strand of activities.
Routing traffic is a key function in communication networks with the common basis for many networks being the Internet Protocol (IP). Its major change from V4 to V6 is an ongoing process with deeper understanding on performance and best current deployment practises being sought. Additionally, the decisions for routing and steering traffic have moved beyond shortest path, often including multiple constraints. Here, particularly the integration of constraints stemming from, e.g., compute resources, energy consumption (of networks and attached endpoints alike), and policies defined often through data governance and business interests have been a keen interest of the R&D community. Moreover, the utilization of AI-based mechanism has attracted much attention in recent research work.
In the activities of this theme, we will seek insights on, among others, AI-based mechanisms, e.g., on IPv6 performance and energy-aware decision mechanisms to explore this wider space that routing has become.
Digital Twins (DTs) is an association of physical objects and software presentations within a virtualized environment, timely reflecting events, actions, status, and data of the (associated) physical objects.
For the management of physical assets, including networks themselves, DTs provide a key framework that intertwines physical reality and logical/SW representation with aspirations to increase operational efficiency, but also allow for scenario-based modelling of use cases and expected behaviour (of the physical environment).
For DTs being successfully developed and deployed, key challenges need addressing, foremost (i) the architecture underpinning the DT, (ii) the realization of stakeholder-specific concerns in the DT presentation, (iii) the development of suitable data models to capture the needed physical/environmental aspects, (iv) the integration with already and to-be-deployed physical artefacts that DTs target to capture (and control).
This theme will target activities addressing those challenges through suitable activities, listed in the following.
Organisation
WG Chairs: Jörg Ott (TUM), Daniel Corujo (IT Aveiro), Dirk Trossen (DaPaDOT Tech)
Mailing list: set@datacom-ia.eu
The charter document of the SET WG describes its mission, objectives and activities.
If you want to know more about the SET Working Group, don’t hesitate to contact us.
