Panel on "Middleware for Next-Generation Converged Networks and Services: Myths or Reality?"

The tighter and tighter converging integration of fixed and mobile telecommunication networks along with the telecom-IP network convergence have opened up the enormous market potential for a rich ecosystem of Next-Generation (NG) converged net-work technologies and services. Such NG services are envisioned to have the capability of seamlessly exploiting all the population of Web applications already available in the IP network and at the same time of leveraging the legacy capabilities and functions of typically proprietary and less open telecom-munication networks. To some extent, the evolution trend is similar to what is happening for pervasive and ubiquitous services in all IP-based mobile computing. Since device miniaturization and wireless communications are making more and more feasible mobility-enhanced services to exploit all potential and opportunities of mobile computing, the goal of the mobility scenarios is becoming the realization of easily and automatically integrated services, towards the ultimate objective of disappearing computing, i.e., the seamless and transparent collaboration of wireless devices to most human activities without the need of explicit user/administration intervention. However, this vision of both converged and seamlessly integrated NG wireless services introduces novel challenging issues for the software infrastructure necessary to support that scenario. The chal-lenges stem from the fact that a converged network needs to carry a multitude of high-bandwidth services over heterogeneous networks that are distributed, multipoint, diverse, and interactive in nature. Support infrastructures will not just relate to the creative routing of connections based on database lookups, but will take on a broader scope including multimedia session management, co-ordination of multi-protocol connections, horizontal/vertical handoff management, mobility predictions, advanced security, … In addi-tion, to stay ahead in the competition and provide market leading offerings, NG network providers further need to enable a global ecosystem of third-party independent application developers to deliver NG converged services by leveraging open standard-based service delivery platforms. Moreover, to establish a common architecture, standards and frameworks will be required to ensure the interoperability of converged networks and services, also to facilitate best utilization of the existing telecommunication infrastructures within the converged ecosystem. Therefore, not to increase too much the burden of NG service designers and implementers in the articulated and converged wireless deployment sce-nario of the future, there is the need for novel middleware solutions capable of addressing connectivity-level, integration, and context-dependent support aspects. Established telecommunication providers often have a plethora of legacy systems, but will be keen to introduce NG technologies to stay competitive. Middleware is the glue for integrating all these systems by providing interoperability, by making systems more autonomic, and by allowing software upgrades to take place without causing downtime. Only such middleware supports could facilitate the development and deployment of economically effec-tive NG services with reduced time-to-market, thus leveraging the potentially enormous market of ser-vices for the ubiquitous and converged mobile net-works of the future. The academic and industrial research on middleware for the support of mobile services in converged wired-wireless networks has achieved very significant results in the last years [1]. A crucial open point is to understand if the on-going research is effectively addressing the real and practical needs of today's NG service industry. The final goal of the panel will be to try to prioritize the research agenda in the field for the years to come in order to better answer the real industry needs and, anyway, to point out the still open primary challenges in the fi...