A number of studies have pointed out on the dramatic increase of Internet traffic exchanged worldwide, around 23% accumulated per year anual, estimated to reach 168 Exabytes exchanged per month by 2019, approximately 22 GB per person. Such an increase is based on several reasons: on one hand the explosive growth of mobile devices along with their popularity and low-cost (estimated 20 billion by 2020); on the other hand the rise and popularity of new interactive services with strict high-bandwidth low-delay requirements, namely video on-demand, online gaming, P2P file sharing, etc. On top of these, the rise of Smart Cities, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Big Data suggest that such a percentage of traffic increase may have been underestimated. ElasticNetworks will address the above challenges and will focus on a number of novel approaches for the design of the Future Internet. In particular, ElasticNetworks will contribute to a holistic redesign of the transport network towards a more agile, flexible, programmable Elastic Network, yet with low operation, deployment and maintenance cost, and energy efficient. This will be a superior network with respect to today's in terms of performance, capable of provisioning network capacity where needed, with a dynamic and mobile network with high bandwidth granularity, capable of dealing with the advent of the all-connected smart world. ElasticNetworks will contribute to such a technological revolution in which the network becomes a single programmable entity, starting from the Data Center supporting the Cloud and ending in the very last user's or thing's device.

-