Communications infrastructure

The First International ICST Conference on Communications Infrastructure, Systems and Applications in Europe (EuropeComm 2009) was held August 11–13, 2009, in London. EuropeComm 2009 brought together decision makers from the EU comm- sion, top researchers and industry executives to discuss the directions of communi- tions research and development in Europe. The event also attracted academia and industry representatives, as well as government officials to discuss the current dev- opments and future trends in technology, applications and services in the communi- tions field. Organizing this conference was motivated by the fact that the development and - ployment of future services will require a common global-scale infrastructure, and therefore it is important that designers and stakeholders from all the systems stacks come together to discuss these developments. Rapidly decreasing costs of compu- tional power, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth have led to the dev- opment of a multitude of applications carrying an increasingly huge amount of traffic on the global networking infrastructure. What we have seen is an evolution: an inf- structure looking for networked applications has evolved into an infrastructure str- gling to meet the social, technological and business challenges posed by the plethora of bandwidth-hungry emerging applications.