The 85th IETF meeting was held in Atlanta on 4 November 2012. STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the definition of hierarchical path computation elements and the extension of the control plane protocols and mechanisms for elastic optical networks.

 STRONGEST held its seventh and last plenary meeting in Torino (October 23-25, 2012), hosted by Telecom Italia Lab. Particular attention was paid, during the meeting, to synthesize the overall results of the Project, to allow a fruitful and significant conclusion of the three years activity (2010-2012).

 A workshop has been organized in Brussels, on October 11, 2012, in context of CaON Cluster meeting. STRONGEST presented its target mid- and longterm architecture and a couple of demonstrations validating the innovative control plane based on H-PCE.

 STRONGEST participated in the Converged and Optical Networks (CaON) cluster meeting that was held in Brussels, on 10 October, 2012 presenting results. STRONGEST also collected architectural vision from all the Projects blonging to the Cluster and contributed to build a “transport architectural big-picture”.

 The STRONGEST and MAINS projects jointly demonstrated an innovative control plane architecture, based on a GMPLS/H-PCE approach, in the workshop “Control Plane architectures for new optical switching technologies” that was held in Amsterdam , in context of ECOC 2012. The experiment demonstrated automated service provisioning between two subwavelegth domains located at Nextworks (Pisa) through MPLS/WSON domains located at CNIT (Pisa), CTTC (Barcelona) and NSN (Munich).

 The 38th European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC 2012) was held in Amsterdam on September 16-20, 2012, and saw a massive acceptance of papers based on STRONGEST results. Thirteen papers were accepted, and one of them was invited (“Infrastructure and Architectures on Demand for Flexible and Elastic Optical Networks” by D. Simeonidou, N. Amaya and G. Zervas)

 During the 84th IETF meeting (Vancouver CA, 26 July – 3 August, 2012) STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the extension of control plane mechanisms, in particular for extending GMPLS concepts to flexgrid networks.

 STRONGEST held its first 2012 plenary meeting (and sixth, overall) in Stuttgart on May 9-11, 2012 (hosted by Alcatel-Lucent), where important and challenging technical items were discussed and subsequent actions by partners were decided.

 The annual Project Review (Audit) was held in Brussels on March 27, 2012. During the audit many questions were raised by the EC experts, to better understand the way the project was managed and to clarify the technical advancement in the second year (2011).

Several suggestions were also provided to improve the quality of Project management and technical results in the third and last year of activity. Finally a gratifying "excellent" evaluation was assigned to STRONGEST.

 During the 8x3rd IETF meeting (Paris, 25-30 March, 2012) STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the extension of control plane mechanisms, to achieve better flexibility and scalability in optical and packet transport networks.

 The Project actively participated in the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC) , that was held in Los Angeles, on March 8-12, 2012, presenting several papers.

 STRONGEST participated in the Converged and Optical Networks (CaON) cluster meeting that was held in Brussels, on February, 2012. The Project presented results about innovative architecture a share with other Projects strategies for standardization.

 The Project actively participated in ONDM 2012, the 16th Int. Conf. on Optical Networking Design and Modeling, that was held at University of Essex, Colchester, UK, on April 17-20, 2012.

The ITU-T Study Group 15 met in Geneva, on December 5-18, 2011. STRONGEST presented, in a plenary session, its results on control plane extensions, energy savings, and architecture alternatives.

The 82nd IETF meeting was held in Taipei (Taiwan) on November 12-18, 2011. STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the definition of hierarchical path computation elements and the extension of the control plane protocols and mechanisms for elastic optical networks.

STRONGEST held its fifth plenary meeting on October 19-21, 2011, at the CNIT National Laboratory of Photonic Networks (Pisa, Italy). Particular attention was paid, during the meeting, to flexi-grid transport solutions, including technology issues, architectures, control plane and provisioning schemes, and recent experimental results.

On October 18, 2011, in Pisa (Italy), STRONGEST organized the Green Telecommunications workshop, inviting other related projects (EARTH, ECONET, GEYSERS, MAINS, OASI, TREND from EC; and Akari from Japan) to share their views on the issue of energy efficiency in telecommunications networks. The workshop included fifteen presentations and a final panel discussion. About 40 people attended the event, that was also broadcast by web TV, to allow remote participation, as well.

The 37th European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC 2011) was held in Geneva on September 18-22, 2011, and saw a massive acceptance of papers based on STRONGEST results. Nine papers were accepted, and one of them (“Field Trial of a 1.5 Tb/s Adaptive and Gridless OXC Supporting Elastic 1000-Fold Bandwidth Granularity” by N. Amaya et al., from University of Essex) won the Fabio Neri Award, as it received the highest score in the area of backbone and core networks.

STRONGEST participated in the ITU Green Standard Week (Roma, September 5 – 9, 2011) by presenting a poster paper describing how the Project will satisfy, mainly through architectural improvements, the ambitious requirement of reducing by a factor 100 the power consumption per bit of  the metro and backbone network segments, in 10 years from now.

During the 81st IETF meeting (Quebec, Canada, July 24-29, 2011) STRONGEST was very active in proposing and discussing solutions for the extension of control plane mechanisms, to achieve better flexibility and scalability in optical and packet transport networks.