In this paper, we describe several approaches to address the challenges of the network of the future. Our main hypothesis is that the Future Internet must be designed for the environment of applications and transport media of the 21st century, vastly different from the initial Internet's life space. One major requirement is the inherent support for mobile and wireless usage. A Future Internet should allow for the fast creation of diverse network designs and paradigms and must also support their co-existence at run-time. We detail the technical and business scenarios that lead the development in the EU FP7 4WARD project towards a framework for the Future Internet.

Adaptive beamforming, using the Conjugate Gradient Normal Equation Residual problem, is applied to a base station array, in the UTRA-TDD up-link. A Wideband Directional Channel Model is used, characterising specific micro-cell, street-type scenarios. These differ in the number of mobile terminals, grouped and placed along the street axis, and on their distances to the base station. Time- and angle-of-arrival spreads, and on-the-air interference content are the main parameters inherently varied and analysed. The average beamforming gain and signal-to-noise ratio are evaluated, also varying the number of array elements. The high number of arriving correlated and closely correlated signals, together with the composed nature of the correlation matrix in the algorithm's cost function, result in that other than the MMSE solutions may lead to the best interference suppression, for the tested scenarios. Among the several weighted interfering power components, the most relevant is due to the delayed signals from all the other links. The combination of the number of arriving orthogonal codes, time-of-arrival and angle-of-arrival spreads condition beamforming performance: the number of array elements affect performance, depending on the mobile terminal distance to the base station, and on the number of active links; for short distances and large number of users, larger time-of-arrival spread degrades beamformer performance, over the opposing effect of angle-of-arrival spread; the number of active users affects beamforming gain especially in the case that delay spreads are larger, i.e., for shorter mobile terminal distances to the base station.