The 85th IETF meeting was held in Atlanta on 4 November 2012. STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the definition of hierarchical path computation elements and the extension of the control plane protocols and mechanisms for elastic optical networks.

 STRONGEST held its seventh and last plenary meeting in Torino (October 23-25, 2012), hosted by Telecom Italia Lab. Particular attention was paid, during the meeting, to synthesize the overall results of the Project, to allow a fruitful and significant conclusion of the three years activity (2010-2012).

 A workshop has been organized in Brussels, on October 11, 2012, in context of CaON Cluster meeting. STRONGEST presented its target mid- and longterm architecture and a couple of demonstrations validating the innovative control plane based on H-PCE.

 STRONGEST participated in the Converged and Optical Networks (CaON) cluster meeting that was held in Brussels, on 10 October, 2012 presenting results. STRONGEST also collected architectural vision from all the Projects blonging to the Cluster and contributed to build a “transport architectural big-picture”.

 The STRONGEST and MAINS projects jointly demonstrated an innovative control plane architecture, based on a GMPLS/H-PCE approach, in the workshop “Control Plane architectures for new optical switching technologies” that was held in Amsterdam , in context of ECOC 2012. The experiment demonstrated automated service provisioning between two subwavelegth domains located at Nextworks (Pisa) through MPLS/WSON domains located at CNIT (Pisa), CTTC (Barcelona) and NSN (Munich).

 The 38th European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC 2012) was held in Amsterdam on September 16-20, 2012, and saw a massive acceptance of papers based on STRONGEST results. Thirteen papers were accepted, and one of them was invited (“Infrastructure and Architectures on Demand for Flexible and Elastic Optical Networks” by D. Simeonidou, N. Amaya and G. Zervas)

 During the 84th IETF meeting (Vancouver CA, 26 July – 3 August, 2012) STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the extension of control plane mechanisms, in particular for extending GMPLS concepts to flexgrid networks.

 STRONGEST held its first 2012 plenary meeting (and sixth, overall) in Stuttgart on May 9-11, 2012 (hosted by Alcatel-Lucent), where important and challenging technical items were discussed and subsequent actions by partners were decided.

 The annual Project Review (Audit) was held in Brussels on March 27, 2012. During the audit many questions were raised by the EC experts, to better understand the way the project was managed and to clarify the technical advancement in the second year (2011).

Several suggestions were also provided to improve the quality of Project management and technical results in the third and last year of activity. Finally a gratifying "excellent" evaluation was assigned to STRONGEST.

 During the 8x3rd IETF meeting (Paris, 25-30 March, 2012) STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the extension of control plane mechanisms, to achieve better flexibility and scalability in optical and packet transport networks.