Next generation ICT technologies are seen as having major impact on our society. The convergence among these technologies such as 5G, SDN, AI, and NFV is highly important. The NGI infrastructure and architecture will have significant challenges of low latency, higher throughput and secure communication, therefore the development of new network protocols should be the core of future R&D efforts. Because of the new networking approaches, and higher demand of interoperability, security may be built within the networking protocol.
HUB4NGI D2.1 identifies following technologies as important for NGI and gathers the citations for each of these.
Internet of Things (IOT):
IoT is marked as the top technology driver by the number of sources. From the results of a large scale survey of European citizens, IoT, Big Data and machine learning are considered to be the most promising technologies which may have larger impact not only on peoples' personal lives but also in the labour market.
At the Digital Innovation Networks (DIN) Forum held on 27 June 2017, from the opinions expressed by experts, almost 80% of participants expressed IoT as the key technology driver for NGI.
Blockchain & Distributed Ledgers
Although still not very familiar to most people, however, blockchain and distributed ledgers are widely being considered as revolutionary technologies. At the Next Generation Internet workshop - "Widen the European space of life and work" held on 8 June 2017, it was highly recommended that we have to adapt and understand blockchain technology and for this purpose training is very important. A research on better compression algorithms is also very important to make this technology more efficient.
The participants in a large scale survey expressed the potential for a financial revolution from these technologies. At the Digital Innovation Networks (DIN) Forum held on 27 June 2017, the experts agreed that a pan European blockchain should be included in the new areas of research and experimentation such as IoT programmability, robotic devices, large scale streams etc.
Big Data
Big Data is also seen by the European citizens as the most promising next generation technology.
Edge Computing
Edge Computing is considered as top-priority technology area by 30% experts at the Digital Innovation Networks Forum held on 27 June 2017.
AI and Autonomous Machines
Autonomous machines, as defined in the Digital Innovation Networks (DIN) Forum in 2017, are intelligent self-driven machines (robots) that are capable to sense their surrounding environment, reason intelligently about it, and take actions to perform tasks in cooperation with humans and other machines in a wide variety of situations on land, sea and air.
With the development and proliferation of autonomous machines, a paradigm shift will occur within the Industrial IoT domains towards Edge Computing, in which programmable, autonomous IoT end-devices can communicate with one another and continue to operate without connectivity.
Artificial Intelligence and autonomous machines are expected to have major impact on our society. With the advancement of machine learning, AI will play an increased role in our daily life (e.g. self-driven cars, semi-automated justice systems etc.).
Open Data
Discoverable and easy to process data is important from the perspective of start-ups. There is a need to develop and "open link" in order to overcome the challenges of format interoperability among data representation and data sources.
Cloud Computing
Although cloud computing pose some security and privacy threats however it is important because of many reasons. For both education and business, cloud solutions are seen as a great opportunity. In order to overcome the challenges of security, privacy and surveillance, new security built protocols could be designed to support new business and social domains.
