Internet traffic is continuously growing exponentially. Meanwhile, the explosive growth of the number of connected devices, backed by applications in the growing Internet of Things, places Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications in the spotlight. Future networks are therefore now called to support applications with requirements ranging from guaranteed delivery of low throughput and low latency flows (M2M) to ones with very high throughput with low delay (4K live streaming). However, the current state of the art shows that scalable solutions are not really feasible. New areas need to be explored and new techniques further developed.

Taking into account the impact of prediction on the users’ demand and availability of network resources could be one direction. By predicting and adapting to upcoming events at various time scales, an anticipatory-enabled network dramatically improves the operation quality and efficiency in comparison to the existing systems. On the other hand, wireless caching and distributed resource management have become core research aspects for the upcoming 5G technologies, with potential for significant benefits. Additionally, due to the massive access of the medium in the 5G era and in the IoT scenarios, more flexible and distributed protocols have to be deployed, focusing on short packets at very high rates. In such protocols the nodes should be auto-configurable without centralized operations.