About this Event

Following the mission of FOKUS to perform applied research on new promising technologies and applications for a converging world and to create awareness within the academia and industry to understand these new technologies and their potentialities, this year´s event is devoted to investigate in the impacts of the progressing adoption of internet technology in our daily life in many different application domains, also referred to as Future Internet, on the evolution of fixed and mobile next generation networks. In this context the notion of the internet of things, machine to machine communications, rich communications, and cloud based service provision are buzzwords, which result in technological changes in current network and service control architectures and platforms.

Last year´s we looked deeper into the new 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC), which becomes of fundamental importance with the global introduction of Long Term Evolution (LTE) based broadband access networks. This year we continue to look at EPC, but also address in this context deeper the "comeback" of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) technology and services. Here IMS based services on top of EPC, particularly Voice over LTE (VOLTE) and Rich Communication Services (RCS), are driving these days IMS deployments all around the world.
In addition, we see the rise of the machine to machine (M2M) age, as more and more devices get connected to the internet, and increasingly in a wireless mode. This has a strong impact on the existing mobile network architectures and related service platforms, which have been designed for human to human communication.
Whereas today M2M architectures and solutions are highly proprietary, we can witness in regard to emerging Future Internet platforms and the notion of Smart City Infrastructures, that convergence is also affecting the M2M domain(s) and thus existing platforms, such as the EPC, are currently extended to cope with Machine Type Communication (MTC).

Furthermore, as network operators have moved into the service enabling business by means of providing corresponding network and service Application Programming Interface (API), also these APIs are affected by these emerging network and service capabilities, and thus enable even more intelligent services.

To make a long story short, we continue our two day event set up. So we will run on day one in the morning tutorials introducing relevant technologies and toolkits. These tutorials provide an ideal start for newcomers but also an update for experienced researchers. In the afternoon we will run an interactive workshop discussing the hot topics in industry and research, such as LTE, EPC, IMS, VOLTE, RCS, M2M, WAC, OTT services, network virtualization, etc. An evening event in a special location will allow the delegates to discuss these hot topics in a relaxed atmosphere and to establish new friendships.

The following workshop day will look at the related deployment experiences and future challenges on a German, European, and global perspective.

Mainly analysts, operators and service providers will speak; vendors will express their views in an interactive vendor panel. Alongside the tutorials and the workshop we will have again a vendor exhibition showing the state of the art of mobile broadband technologies and applications, as well as new demonstrations from the FOKUS technology playgrounds.

So what can you expect from these two days?

You will learn about the fundamentals of IMS, EPC and MTC architectures and capabilities
You will learn how operators will roll out LTE and EPC
You will learn what applications we will see above LTE/EPC
You will learn how EPC and IMS relate to each other, e.g. for VOLTE, RCS
You will learn about potential operator applications on top of LTE/EPC, such as mobile clouds and M2M
You will learn what potentialities over the top (OTT) players see once LTE/EPC becomes available
You will see first IMS and MTC applications on top of LTE/EPC
You will learn aboutthe emerging Future Internet and Smart City Infrastructures
And finally you will meet technical experts from all over the world and have the chance to engage in detailed technical discussions and make new friends