CREATE-NET (Center for REsearch And Telecommunication Experimentation for NETworked communities) is a non-profit international research organization that, through top level collaboration and strategic alliances, brings together some of the best research groups in all areas of networking and communications providing a unified global cooperative research platform. Established in 2003, CREATE-NET pursues research and development activities, with core competences in advanced communication technologies, with special emphasis in broadband, pervasive, wireless, networked multimedia and security technologies. CREATE-NET supports its research activity through an advanced test-bed infrastructure, based on the principle of an open environment, which provides distributed, operational high-bandwidth telecommunications infrastructure, for testing advanced technology and services and promotes the collaboration within government, industry and community.

In particular, the Multimedia Services Competence Center (MSCC) provides prototypes design and implementation, including proof of concepts in the heterogeneous networks arena. MSCC focuses on performance evaluation (in the sense of capacity evaluation of network/sub-network/access-network) and on algorithm design for media processing and communication. Besides, the Broadband Research Area focuses on optical networks, different access systems (including 60 GHz wireless, Ethernet Passive Optical Networking, etc.), GMPLS and grid-based technologies.

CREATE-NET has hundreds of collaborating researchers in 250 partners’ research teams. In the frameworks of these collaborations CREATE-NET received funding from the EU for four projects presented in the IV IST CALL and passed the evaluation for 11 proposals for the V IST CALL; two out of the latter’s have been already funded, while three are in the second phase of evaluation.

Moreover, CREATE-NET has successfully presented 5 proposals for supporting international cooperation with China, Israel and USA Institutions and successfully applied to Fondazione Ugo Bordoni for WiMAX experimentation licenses.

Finally, CREATE-NET is very active in organizing different events (conferences, workshops and seminars) for research and exploitations in all telecommunications related areas and in hosting visiting fellows from top universities and research labs worldwide.

CREATE-NET will play a key role in the application layer, by delivering working solutions for scalable video coding applied to DVB-H and DMB-T. The other scientific activity where CREATE-NET is involved relates to the development of optimization algorithms for the middleware platform. Finally, thanks to its international role, CREATE-NET will take care of the dissemination activity.