Digital transformation enhances both economic development and the quality of life for citizens. This evolution is based on the deployment of a network, computing and service infrastructure that is highly sophisticated in terms of its size, the diversity of its components and the range of specialized uses it allows. Such an infrastructure is made of a large set of heterogeneous hardware/software components resulting in a system of systems whose availability, reliability, performance, interoperability and energy efficiency are becoming major challenges. Disruptive intelligent technologies are key enablers for this evolution, driving automation, enabling early detection of faults and cyberattacks, and optimizing resource usage to meet stringent service performance and resource requirements.

A special focus will be set on the conference theme “Disruptive Intelligent Technologies for Next-Generation Clouds and Networks”.

Areas of interest and topics include, but are not limited to:

Intelligent network service management

Intelligent end-to-end service configuration
Intelligent and cooperative management models across heterogeneous network segments from IoT to Cloud and back
Intelligent, resilient and robust schemes in the IoT-edge-cloud continuum service management
Enablers for cross-network intelligence and services trustworthiness
Intelligent and flexible networks and services for high adaptability
Digital twin for network service management
Distributed intelligence in B5G/6G networks

IoT-edge-cloud continuum

Intelligent edge for vertical industries
Digital twin challenges for the IoT-edge-cloud continuum and life cycle automation
Vehicular cloud services
Industrial networks and services for an intelligent automation
Functional decomposition and orchestration, service chaining
Communication protocols for ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability
Fog, edge and multi-access computing and networking
Security, trust and privacy for the IoT-edge-cloud continuum

Enablers and services for intelligent wireless and mobile networks

Network and service architecture, protocols, application-network layer interworking
Scalability and multi-tenancy in beyond wireless, cellular and emerging networks
Green networking and efficient resource usage and service delivery
Security, trust and privacy management in large systems and smart environments

Network automation and orchestration architectures and protocols

Zero-touch network and service management and orchestration
Artificial Intelligence for networks and networks for Artificial Intelligence
Orchestration of mobile and ephemeral resources, automated infrastructure discovery
Network data analytics, anomaly detection and feature extraction
Autonomic and cognitive networking
Automated data, control, and management planes
Intent-based network management
Self-driving networks
Network programmability
Automated QoS/QoE management
Orchestration of distributed cloud, edge and network resources
Security, societal, and legal aspects of network automation
Federated learning-based applications
Federated Networks

Technologies for innovation in clouds, edge, networks and IoT

SDN, NFV, service function chaining, function placement and network embedding
Serverless computing and FaaS
Application-aware networking
Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies in networking and network services
Advanced multimedia and real-time communications
QoE/QoS Assurance
Lightweight virtualization technologies, software and hardware acceleration
Energy-efficient software-defined infrastructures
Measurement, monitoring and telemetry
Time-sensitive and deterministic networking
Open-source projects, testbeds and open standards