The user demand for multimedia application over the Internet has been rapidly growing in the past few years. Voice over IP (VoIP), IPTV and Video on Demand (VoD) applications are gaining an ever increasing popularity, favored by the massive deployment of wireless access technologies. Supporting these applications requires Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning and management both in the access and in the core segments of the network. Within the ANTARES consortium, the AWCS group possesses specific expertise on many aspects of the above challenge, such as:

• wireless technologies and mesh networks
• scheduling and resource allocation in wired and wireless networks
• traffic engineering
• advanced methods and techniques for network performance evaluation

The research of the AWCS group in the above fields is carried out in cooperation with major industry players, such as Nokia Siemens Networks; Telecom operators, such as Telecom Italia, France Telecom, Telefonica I+D, and Italian and European universities, in the framework of private contracts as well as national and IST-funded projects. Besides giving rise to a large number of highly-rated scientific publications on the leading journals and conferences, the research of the AWCS group has led to several international patents.