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The conference's extensive keynote and plenary schedule concluded this morning with the highly-informative addresses of leading industry experts highlighting the next wave of transformational communications and the evolving needs, expectations and requirements of companies and individuals worldwide.Introduced by Industry Forums & Exposition Chair Brian Lakey, Marcus Weldon, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent began the executive session by welcoming attendees to "The Arrival of the Tablet Generation" and its role in changing the principles of behavior on a global scale. As background, he cited the recent sale of more than 100 million tablets globally and other statistics illustrating that 66 percent of Americans sleep with SmartPhones, 84 percent of Germans would choose the Internet over a car and 500 million people use Facebook application platforms monthly. According to Weldon, this has created a "profound shift in the next digital economy" that will generate new revenue streams based on the tablet's ability to transcend age groups and converge the cloud with enterprises and the home to provide "everything in one device." Following these comments, Dr. Raj Jain of Washington University, St. Louis, spoke about the "Next Generation Internet and the Architecture for the Future." He stated that "the real money is knowing the future" and understanding that "the most valued companies in the stock market are generally those that lead the paradigm shift." Dr. Jain also noted that we are at the "knee of the mobile internet age" and the industry is about to experience an "explosion of mobile applications and cloud services" offering enhanced miniaturization, mobility, distance and applications driven by the ability to meet numerous social needs related to energy, health and security.Lucy Hood of the Institute of Communications Technology Management (CTM) then discussed her company's "mission to create and disseminate knowledge" based on information derived from the entire business value chain. This includes studying the symbiotic relationship between devices and activities to better understand "what is coming next" and "what people are likely to do next in their digital lives." For instance, while "everyone wants more variety, control and security," some specific "user groups desire very different innovations." For instance, "basic folk" crave home security, while "gaming people would like more access to educational content such automated online tutorials."During the final address of the morning, Victor Bahl of Microsoft discussed "Putting the Cloud in the Palm of Your Hand." In addition to highlighting the need for ubiquitous connectivity, he talked about the latest research utilizing cloudlets as hot spots in public spaces as well as WhiteFi connectivity options for building world-class cloud services delivering nearly unlimited resources. This includes realizing the full potential of mobile computing supported by 100k+ cloud-enabled applications.

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Abstract-The Point Coordination Function (PCF) of the IEEE 802.11 standard represents a well-known Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol providing Quality-of Service guarantees in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). However, with the currently employed polling mechanism WLANs consume a significant amount of the energy resources from batterypowered user devices. To provide energy saving, an improved MAC protocol is presented in this paper, where bidirectional transmissions of fixed duration are incorporated into PCF in order to enable dynamic scheduling of real-time traffic. Based on this new strategy, wireless access points (APs) can estimate the proper duration of the Contention Free Period (CFP), in order to allow mobile stations to acknowledge any received data packet with a data packet equal to the received packet in size. Having this information, a mobile station, following the data exchange with the AP, can determine its wake-up timer and activate the sleep mode for the rest of the CFP interval. Comprehensive computerbased simulations demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed MAC improvements to achieve energy efficiency with negligible impact on packet delivery delay.

This paper introduces an industrial cyber-physical system (CPS) based on the Internet of Things (IoT) that is designed to detect rare events based on machine learning. The framework follows the following three generic steps: (1) Large data acquisition / dissemination: A physical process is monitored by sensors that pre-process the (assumed large) collected data and send the processed information to an intelligent node (e.g., aggregator, central controller); (2) Big data fusion: The intelligent node uses machine learning techniques (e.g., data clustering, neural networks) to convert the received ("big") data to useful information to guide short-term operational decisions related to the physical process; (3) Big data analytics: The physical process together with the acquisition and fusion steps can be virtualized, building then a cyber-physical process, whose dynamic performance can be analyzed and optimized through visualization (if human intervention is available) or artificial intelligence (if the decisions are automatic) or a combination thereof. Our proposed general framework, which relies on an IoT network, aims at an ultra-reliable detection/prevention of rare events related to a predetermined industrial physical process (modelled by a particular signal). The framework will be processindependent, however, our demonstrated solution will be designed case-by-case. This paper is an introduction to the solution to be developed by the FIREMAN consortium.