General Papers Introduction

The increasing role-even preeminence-of the end user in telecommunications today is one of the key trends facing Alcatel-Lucent and the entire telecom industry. This means that technology studies are more and more often driven or provoked by end user requirements, requests, or latent needs. Alcatel-Lucent's answer to this challenge encompasses strategic directions in both application enablement and high leverage network technology The papers presented in this General Papers issue of the Bell Labs Technical Journal demonstrate how Alcatel-Lucent has integrated that trend at the different technical levels of the communication domain, from end user applications to wireless and optical networks, dealing with technologies related to semantics and interaction, network capabilities, network engineering, security, new access networks, and improvement in access and optical networks. (C) 2011 Alcatel-Lucent.