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.

Contributions were presented to  the IETF (Bejing, China, November 7-12, 2010 ), introducing extensions to the Path Computation Element communication Protocol, or PCEP (draft-ietf-pcegmpls-pcep-extensions-01, draft-gonzalezdedios-pce-resvres-context-state-00, draft-zhao-pce-pcep-interdomain-p2mp-procedures-06).

STRONGEST participated in the Socio-Economics of the Network of the Future workshop (Brussels, 18 October 2010) with an invited statement in the discussion about "The price of quality in telecommunication networks", giving an overview of the end-to-end QoS assurance in transport networks.

STRONGEST participated in the Converged and Optical Networks (CaON) cluster workshop held in Stockholm, 6- 8 October 2010, organized by the Cluster coordinator M. Popov. The workshop represented an informal discussion in preparation for the CaON official cluster meeting, to be held in Brussels on 20 October, 2010. STRONGEST also had the opportunity to present its objectives and preliminary results to the Photonics (area Communication Networks) Concertation meeting 2010.

The Project actively partecipated in ECOC 2010 (Turin, Italy, 19 - 23 September 2010), through some of its partners, that co-chaired the conference and some sessions, and presented several technical papers.

STRONGEST participated in Future Internet & Mobile Summit (Florence, Italy, 16-18 June 2010) with two presentations: “STRONGEST: Challenges for Network Architectures” and “Green features of STRONGEST”. During the summit, A. Di Giglio also participated in a panel discussion about “Power savings in next generation Internet”.

STRONGEST presented two papers at the 15th European Conference on Networks and Optical Communications 2010 (Faro, Portugal, 9 June 2010): “Migration steps towards STRONGEST architecture” (J. F. Palacios) and “Efficient Sub-wavelength Switching Based on Hierarchical Traffic Aggregation” (A. Stavdas).

The second STRONGEST plenary meeting was held in Munich (Germany) on 18-20 May 2010, hosted by Nokia Siemens Networks.This meeting was mainly focused on the presentation of the Project Management Plan as aand to the sharing of preliminary results obtained by the technical work packages.

During the “Future Internet Cluster Meeting”, that was held in Sophia Antipolis on 9 March 2010, first contacts were established among STRONGEST and the other FP7 projects ETICS and GEYSERS.

The STRONGEST project contributed to the Future Networks 5th FP7 Concertation meeting that was held in Brussels on 26-28 January 2010. In that event a short presentation about STRONGEST objectives and workplan was given.

The STRONGEST kick-off meeting was held in Turin (Italy) on 19-21 January 2010, hosted by Telecom Italia. During the meeting the activities of the various workpackages were presented and discussed. The General assembly agreed on the year workplan, on the establishment of relationships with other FP7 projects (ETICS, MAINS and GEYSERS) and on the presentation of project contributions to various events in 2010.