CONSERN is an ICT FP7 Small or medium-scale focused research project running under Grant Agreement INFSO-ICT-257542 from June 2010 to May 2012. CONSERN aims at developing and validating a novel paradigm for dedicated, purpose-driven small scale wireless networks and systems characterized by a service-centric evolutionary approach introduced here as an energy-aware self-growing network.

CONSERN has 9 partners across Europe. Fraunhofer is represented in this project by its Institute FOKUS and by the RESCON and CRN@NGNI groups focusing on wireless sensor network integration and on cognitive architectures and methods enabling the self-growing paradigm. The self-growing paradigm, invented by the CRN@NGNI group, models a self-organizing network by a sequence of purposes (i.e. configurations and/or applications) developing along a pre-planned or dynamically configured life-cycle. When progressing along this life-cycle, the self-management capacity of the network can estimate the cost and benefit ─ based on suitable metrics that are meaningful for the targeted application ─ of reconfiguring the whole network or parts of it. In case of responding to a reconfiguration request from an external event ─ potentially in response to an incident ─ the cognitive control of a self-growing network can predict the decrease in capacity to realize a planned purpose that results from configuring back and forth. This is of relevance, for example, in resource constraint networks (such as wireless sensor networks), because reconfiguring and handling an incident may create dysfunctional nodes. 

• National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 
  
• Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH 
  
• Huawei Technologies Sweden AB 
  
• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. Fraunhofer
  
• Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology
  
• Intel Mobile Communications
  
• Interuniversitair Micro-Electronika Centrum VZW
  
• Toshiba Research Europe Ltd
  
• Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation S.A.