Safety is at the core of ATC. However, safety is interrelated with efficiency. Air and Ground Safety Nets have been developed to increase the achieved level of safety. Necessarily, Ground and Air Safety Nets have to evolve to keep up with the challenges originating from ever increasing traffic density and complexity. ATM evolutions necessary to safely handle increasing traffic demand or to improve efficiency of air transportation impose new challenging requirements on existing Safety Nets. Future Air and Ground safety nets need to support Trajectory Based Operations and new separation modes: they must provide necessary alerts for actual or potential hazardous situations in an efficient way and avoid or minimise unnecessary alerts. The SESAR 2020 PJ11-CAPITO project will anticipate these required evolutions to maintain, and if possible improve the level of safety. It will also support the safe integration of new airspace users such as Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) in ATM. PJ11-CAPITO work is focussed on developing and validating requirements in five solutions: one addressing the ground safety nets (in particular Short Term Conflict Alert) and four focussing on the development of specific variants of the new generation of Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems: ACAS Xa for commercial aviation, ACAS Xu for RPAS, ACAS Xo for Specific operations such as parallel approaches, and ACAS Xp for General Aviation. Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems need to be interoperable worldwide, which is primarily ensured through the standardisation process. PJ11 CAPITO will federate European requirements’ capture and ensure that they are taken into account in the global standardisation processes. PJ11 CAPITO unites key European aviation partners including Air Navigation Service Providers, Ground Industry, Airborne industry and EUROCONTROL so that required complementary expertise is available to achieve these ambitious objectives.

The extreme growth and adoption of Social Media, in combination with their poor governance and the lack of quality control over the digital content being published and shared, has led information veracity to a continuous deterioration. Current approaches entrust content verification to a single centralised authority, lack resilience towards attempts to successfully “game” verification checks, and make content verification difficult to access and use. In response, SocialTruth’s ambition is to create an open, democratic, pluralistic and distributed ecosystem that allows easy access to various verification services (both internal and third-party), ensuring scalability and establishing trust in a completely decentralized environment. The distinctive advantages are: a) avoidance of vendor lock-in through access to configurable combinations of various content analytics and verification services (with support for text, image and video content) via standard Application Programming Interfaces; b) distributed trust and reputation establishment powered by blockchain technology, ensuring immutability and auditability, revealing information cascades and empowering an information veracity observatory; c) integration of lifelong learning approach for detection of new paradigms of fake news; d) easy interaction through a Digital Companion that allows convenient everyday access of individual users to verification services from within their browsers. SocialTruth will benefit: a) Individual users to verify the validity of Social Media content and prevent misinformation spread; b) Media organisations, content authors and journalists to boost their investigative capabilities by enabling improved cross-checking of various multimedia information sources; c) Search engines, Social Media platforms and e-advertising networks to improve information veracity and contribute into a more sustainable and quality-oriented web and social media ecosystem.

The operators’ networks have significantly evolved over the last few years. Derived from the cloud computing paradigm, new network virtualization technologies are emerging. These technologies bring agility in the management of infrastructures and services while rationalizing expenditures. They also enable network operators to improve the value-added of their networks and datacenters by offering new services. In complementarity to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which aims at decoupling the control plane from the data plane and providing network programmability, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) focuses on implementing network functions (switching, DPI, load-balancing, caching, ciphering etc.) in software and deploying them on (high-volume) standard servers or shared infrastructures. For instance, depending on the load, the provisioning (creation or suppression) of the VM containing the virtualized network function allows to optimize the resources’ usage, and to face the demand, while respecting a QoS level, e.g., as stated in a service level agreement. NFV thus represents a disruptive change in the way networks are architected and operated. Over the next few years, NFV will penetrate further into Telco. However, even though the ETSI’s NFV working group, which now gathers more than 200 network operators, telecoms equipment vendors, IT vendors and technology providers progresses on the specification of the NFV architecture, there are still many research issues requiring investigation. The REFLEXION (REsilient and FLEXible Infrastructure for Open Networking) project is an industrial research project that leans on the complementary technical expertise of the partners to bring (i) robustness and flexibility in NFV-SDN architectures, in particular to support critical services, and (ii) dynamicity and efficiency for the provisioning and the chaining of virtualized network functions. On the first axis, REFLEXION will in particular investigate network failure diagnosis and fault management for NFV in SDN so that services can keep operating in a seamless way, and distribution techniques to increase the robustness of the NFV control and management planes. The project will also provide methods to design robust virtual services taking into account the potential threats in the architecture and mitigation options. REFLEXION will also address NFV performance and dynamicity. Indeed, it is all the more crucial to measure the utilization of resources and the performances of the services in a virtualized environment (e.g., to avoid interferences between the different functions and instances). The project will thus propose innovative metrology tools to passively monitor virtualized network functions with the lowest footprint. It will also provide new methods to provision, re-provision, or de-provision the low-level resources (CPU, RAM, I/O etc.) associated to a virtual machine to meet the performances required for the virtualized network functions within a server in order to meet the global service objectives. Finally, the project will investigate, at the network-wide level, optimization techniques to dynamically (re-)allocate virtualized network functions and chain them so as to satisfy the tradeoff between QoS/QoE and network footprint. REFLEXION will be based on a critical services use case. The new network virtualization technologies affect particularly the critical services such as the e-health sector, business networks, etc., that have strict availability, reliability and performance requirements. Telecom operators (Telco) need to build robust and efficient networks in order to provide and maintain such services. REFLEXION is an appealing NFV-oriented project with a strong potential. We expect REFLEXION results to impact standards and NFV-SDN communities (ETSI NFV, IETF, ONF), the scientific and research areas. The partners have extensive experience in networks, modeling, optimization, virtualization and large-scale experiments.

ACCENT5 project proposes innovative technological approaches for a smooth integration of D2D communication in future (5G) wireless networks. The proposed solutions allow increased data throughputs and dynamic resource allocation in D2D communications in a relaxed and completely omitted synchronization manner, in order to satisfy the emerging new data service needs in cohabitation with the existing cellular communications in the same frequency bands. The project will study advanced waveforms to provide additional enhancements to Filter bank Multicarrier (FBMC) and OFDM based physical layer performance for D2D. It will define a new MAC layer to include the possibility of D2D communications and considering the characteristics of the waveform defined for D2D transmissions. It will study D2D-related green aspects for 5G systems, including interference reduction and HPA efficiency optimisation. Active participation to standardization bodies (i.e., 3GPP) and publications will guarantee a strong dissemination.