Fabio Neri suddenly passed away on April 16, 2011, during a ski trip in Piemonte, We will all miss you, Fabio.

STRONGEST held its fourth plenary meeting on April 5-7, 2011, at the University of Essex (Colchester, UK). One of the most important meeting outcomes was the agreement on the experimental validation of theoretical results, particularly about target architecture and control plane extensions.

The multi-granular technology, promising to mitigate the bandwidth scalability bottleneck, was discussed in depth on April 4, 2011, in a dedicated internal workshop held at University of Essex (Colchester, UK), where the partners agreed on the way of investigating this solution, that seems particularly appealing for long term architectures.

On March 22, 2011, STRONGEST had in Brussels its periodic review meeting, the annual check carried out by the European Commission to evaluate the quality of the technical work and the correctness of the cost claim. STRONGEST was graded “good” for its 2010 activity and results, with only few minor remarks, confirming the high quality of the Project work and the wide interest about the subjects under study.

STRONGEST actively participated in the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC), the largest scientific event in the field of optical communications, that was held in Los Angeles on March 6-10, 2011. Eight papers (one of which invited), describing significant outcomes of the Project activities, were presented.

The STRONGEST website was enriched by an RSS feed that directly points to the CORDIS news website, thus increasing its visibility in the European research community.

STRONGEST participated in the Converged and Optical Networks (CaON) cluster meeting that was held in Brussels, on 12 February 2011. The Project is increasing its involvement in CaON, as Dimitra Simeonidu (University of Essex) has been elected chair of the cluster for 2011, while Juan Fernandez Palacios (STRONGEST architecture chief ) and Andrea Di Giglio (STRONGEST projet coordinator) have been designated co-chairs.

The Project actively partecipated in ONDM 2011 (Bologna, Italy, 7—11 February 2011), where some papers were presented under the STRONGEST umbrella; furthermore STRONGEST delegates participated in a panel discussion about the evolution of network control planes, where the need of a common view on standardization-oriented activities among FP7 Projects was raised.

A first presentation of the STRONGEST project and its goals was made (Trebeurden, France - 26 – 30 April 2010) to ETSI Environmental Engineering (EE), and a liaison exchange was started to gain access to latest ETSI work and to inform EE about positions and developments at STRONGEST.

STRONGEST held its third plenary meeting in Turin, on 16-18 November, 2010. The meeting was mainly focused on the discussion about control plane evolution and innovative network and node architecture. Particular attention was paid to the introduction of multi-granular gridless optical switching technologies. In the plenary session STRONGEST beneficiaries were encouraged to undertake actions in support of gender equal opportunities inside the Project.