SECRET is a collaborative European Training Network (ETN) committed to create an “excellent” educational training platform; that is multi-disciplinary and intersectoral in nature, for Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of wireless communications and networking. In this dynamic field, the challenges are always evolving and more stringent in line with market expectation, and socio-economical requirements. The chapter of 4G (4th Generation) of mobile systems is finally coming to an end, with waves of 4G systems deployed over Europe and worldwide. 4G systems provide a universal platform for broadband mobile services at any time, any place and anywhere. However, mobile traffic is still growing at an unprecedented rate and the need for more sophisticated broadband services is still further pushing the limits on current standards to provide even tighter integration between wireless technologies and higher speeds. The increase in number of mobile devices and traffic, the change in the nature of service and device, along with the pressure on operation and capital costs, and energy efficiency are all continuously putting stringent limits on the requirement of the design of mobile networks. It is widely accepted that incremental enhancements of current networking paradigm will not achieve or come close to meeting the requirements of networking by 2020 . This has led to the need of a new generation of mobile communications: the so-called 5G. The interests of stakeholders and academic researchers are now focused on 5G paradigm. Although 5G systems are not expected to penetrate the market till 2020, the evolution towards 5G is widely accepted to be the convergence of internet services with existing mobile networking standards leading to the commonly used term “mobile internet” over heterogeneous networks (HetNets), with very high connectivity speeds. This proposal aims to narrow the gap between current networking technologies and the foreseen requirements of future 2

The proposed SELFNET project will design and implement an autonomic network management framework to achieve self-organizing capabilities in managing network infrastructures by automatically detecting and mitigating a range of common network problems that are currently still being manually addressed by network operators, thereby significantly reducing operational costs and improving user experience. SELFNET explores a smart integration of state-of-the-art technologies in Software-Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Self-Organizing Networks (SON), Cloud computing, Artificial intelligence, Quality of Experience (QoE) and Next-generation networking to provide a novel intelligent network management framework that is capable of assisting network operators in key management tasks: automated network monitoring by the automatic deployment of NFV applications to facilitate system-wide awareness of Health of Network metrics to have more direct and precise knowledge about the real status of the network; autonomic network maintenance by defining high-level tactical measures and enabling autonomic corrective and preventive actions against existing or potential network problems. SELFNET is driven by use cases designed to address major network management problems including Self-protection capabilities against distributed cyber-attacks, Self-healing capabilities against network failures, and Self-optimization to dynamically improve the performance of the network and the QoE of the users. SELFNET is designed within this economic and business context to substantially reduce operational costs of network operators by automating a significant number of current labour-intensive network management tasks. Therefore, SELFNET directly addresses the Strand Network Management challenge highlighted by the EC.