Impacts

The advent of end-to-end reconfigurability is influencing the structure of the industry, creating new markets and new employment opportunities, notably in the area of content creation, new services and service/content creation tools but also in wireless information technology administration (WIT). Having the aim to support making Europe a first choice for investments into ICT, E2R impact on standards and its input to shape future regulation will be increased.

The advantages for industry and users will be extended in the next years and can be captured as follows:

• Efficient, advanced and flexible end-user service provision. The reconfigurability management of the network and systems will also be serving the optimal provision of end-user services and applications. The aspect of end-to-end reconfigurability encompasses tailoring of application and service provision implementing user preferences and profiles, while considering network/terminal capabilities, configuration and equipment profiles, as well as service/charging/security profiles and related context, thus supporting and employing the principles of context aware and ambient intelligent systems.
• Efficient spectrum, radio and equipment resources utilisation. With close collaboration with the regulations authorities e.g. ITU, ECC and several European regulators, enabling technologies for flexible spectrum resources and the associated usage, equipment circulation and security issues will be devised. The outcome of E2R II input to the regulatory discussions is intended to lead to a simplified regulatory framework which allows the flexible assignment and use of spectrum facilitated through techniques that implement an optimised resource usage. The aim to facilitate simpler and more market aware flexible spectrum management will be exploited through the use of equipment and systems capable to reconfigure and to be operable in situations where private users to access portions of bandwidth that would be unlicensed.
• Reduced cost to upgrade fielded systems. Technologies investigated and developed in E2R II will help making equipment upgradeable through software downloads (e.g. over the air in case of mobile devices of end-users), meaning that both small changes to system parameters, as well as complete exchange of the communication standards implemented can be performed. This will improve both, the economics of expensive infrastructure systems (since the cost of the hardware and deployment can now be amortized over a longer lifetime) as well as the efficiency of resource usage, as systems may be configured to serve the actual load situation in an optimised manner.
• Multi-standard platforms. As radio standard implementations of equipment will be combinations of hard and software, it will be possible to dynamically share single hardware platforms between multiple radio implementations. This will facilitate that channel resources may be shifted among different communications standards as reaction to actual load shifts. Hence, the cost of the infrastructure to support a mixture of legacy and newly deployed fixed-standard radio equipment can be reduced significantly.
• Better support for customised solutions. Developers or vendors will be able to modify the communications standards of devices without having to invest in a new hardware design. Users who need relatively small volumes of devices, for whom the cost of custom hardware is prohibitive, will gain the ability to improve their operations with devices optimised and customised to their special needs.
• Reduced standards risk. Operators deploying expensive infrastructure (including base stations, access points or gateways…) or large numbers of mobile devices will be able to do so without locking into the communications standard that will initially be used. This will help the operator to avert potential changes in standards and will also provide them with the possibility to react to changes in user requirements or user (market) behaviour.

E2R II addresses a distributed framework for reconfigurability management and control. The reconfigurability functions are distributed over different network elements at various levels of the system topology. E2R I was researching on the key enabling technologies for end-to-end reconfigurability ensuring seamless experience. The technical research on diverse concepts (system architecture, network and equipment management, resources management…) is complemented by two important research streams on business modeling and regulatory evolution. The business models research is enabling the selection of the most relevant concepts and solutions, from a business perspective, ensuring development and future deployment of sustainable reconfigurable systems. The regulatory research is, on one side, permitting the selection of concepts and solutions being developed and deployed in the different regions, on the basis of wide acceptance, and on the other side make evolve the regulatory framework in order to cope with the future development of solutions for managing and controlling complex heterogeneous systems. The business model research and the regulatory research are also clearly connected to each other thanks to the innovative concept of the “Responsibility Chain” launched by E2R I.