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The needs for education, learning and training proliferate primarily due to the facts that economy becomes more and more knowledge based (mandating continuous lifelong learning) and people migrate among countries, which introduces the need for learning other languages, for training on different skills and learning about the new cultural and societal framework. Given that in parallel, time schedules continuously become tighter, learning through mobile devices continuously gains in popularity as it allows for learning anytime, anywhere. To increase the learning efficiency, personalisation (in terms of selecting the learning content, type and presentation) and adaptation of the learning experience in real time based on the experienced affect state are key instruments. All these user requirements challenge the current network architectures and technologies. In this paper, we investigate the requirements implied by efficient mobile learning scenarios and we explore how 5G technologies currently under design/testing/validation and standardisation meet these requirements.

Residential energy consumption reserves a significant portion of the total energy consumption in modern cities. The rates of construction of new buildings as well as the rates of renovation on existing ones are generally very low. At the same time, unlike centrally operated large commercial buildings, the installation of energy management systems is a rather expensive solution leaving residential users with limited means to improve their energy efficiency as results are not evident. Considering that to drive energy efficient behaviour, we have to first raise awareness, then provide evidence through measurements and then support further, more elaborate, energy efficiency actions, we capitalise on ICT as soft measures towards reaching hard goals. We propose a novel incremental solution starting from a rather simple mobile application exploiting the sensors available in our smartphones and tablets to proceed to more intelligent advice provisioning towards energy efficiency. We present its implementation architecture and discuss certain market-wise challenges to prove its potential.

Free space optical (FSO) communications links is a promising solution for the provision of high data rate point to point communications. In particular deploying FSO technology for mobile links between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and fixed Ground Stations (GS) introduces several interesting challenges. In this paper, we investigate the ability of a mobile FSO system to operate in different atmospheric conditions. Specifically, we characterize the quality of the optical channel with a proper model in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and average Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and we report a detailed optical amplification model able to support a constant Quality of Service for different distances from 1 km up to 35 km at 10 Gbps with 1550 nm wavelength. An extensive comparative analysis among different FSO configurations links considering the altitude of the UAV, the wavelength and the atmospheric conditions is provided. The results show that there is degradation at the BER over a slanted path compared to a horizontal path at the same conditions.