We report on an 100 MHz repetition rate integrated photonic transmitter at 850 nm with arbitrary amplitude and polarization modulation. The source is suitable for free-space quantum communication links, in particular for quantum key distribution applications. The whole transmitter, with the optical and electronic components integrated, has reduced size and power consumption. In addition, the optoelectronic components forming the transmitter can be space-qualified, making it suitable for satellite and future space missions.

Through new interactive features, television is becoming a central hub for entertainment, communication, and sharing. Instead of old, push-based broadcasting to set-top-boxes, new pull-based, interactive services and tighter integration with other audio/visual entertainment devices enable ambient access to tv programming. Thus, with the steering committee members, Marina Geymonat (Telecom Italia, Italy) and Roberto Rossetto (RAI-Teche, Italy), we have envisioned and organized the Ambient Media Delivery and Interactive Television workshop, AMDIT 2008, focusing on the data management challenges associated with the design of ambient media delivery and user aware interactive television systems, to make television programmes available and easily accessible in multiple contexts, through diverse media devices. Below, I provide an overview of the contributions to the workshop.

We present 2-Chord Halved, a distributed peer-to-peer lookup protocol. Our proposal is based on Chord exhibit the following advantages: i) We show a stabilization procedure that eliminates the fixfinger procedure of Chord protocol. Our strategy allows to inform each node on the ring that is interested to a topological change. Fixfinger in Chord costs O(log2 N) messages when it is ran on all finger table entries even if the finger table is up to date, contrariwise our stabilization procedure, that has the same cost, is ran only if there are join or leave operations and only on the interested nodes. ii) We present a new strategy to implement the join/leave operations using the predecessor's finger table of joined node and exploiting the fingers of predecessor as start point searching new fingers. This procedure costs O(logN log logN) w.h.p., contrariwise to Chord within join/leave operation cost O(log2 N) w.h.p. iii) We show a new routing strategy that has a moderate improvement on average path length. The improvements are obtained with no harm to the operational efficiency (e.g. stability, scalability, fault-tolerance, node congestion) of the Chord systems.

The current increment of the service portfolio for mobile communications and the related traffic load require an extension of the capacities in the mobile networks. As a consequence, mobile network operators have to replace part of the traditional equipment based on 2G GSM/GPRS by the 3G equipment based on UMTS and even start the path in direction to the 4G installing HSPA. This leads to techno-economical studies which require a corresponding service network model and its implementation in form of a computer support planning tool. This paper presents such a model and the structure and characteristics of the corresponding tool 2G/3G-Conncet. The paper also indicates corresponding applications.

A photonic 2x2 node architecture for synchronous all-optical packet switching networks, able to process ultra-fast packet signals is presented. All node functions (label recognition and processing, contention detection and resolution, switch control, actual switching, and regeneration) are optically performed. Combinations of the proposed 2times2 element can be used in order to obtain more complex NtimesN photonic nodes. Implementations of all subsystems needed to realize the describe 2times2 photonic node are reported, and different solutions for several blocks are compared in order to optimize the node performances.