International acknowledgements: Alessandro Pacini, a doctoral student in Emerging Digital Technologies at the Sant'Anna School, receives the Best Demo Award at the IEEE NFV-SDN 2022 international conference

Alessandro Pacini, PhD student in Emerging Digital Technologies (EMT) at the TeCIP Institute of the Sant'Anna School, receives the prestigious "Best Demo Award" at the IEEE International Conference on Network Functions Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking (IEEE NFV-SDN 2022).

The event, organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), involves hundreds of experts from around the world in the field of Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking from year to year. This edition, hosted by the Intel Campus in Chandler (Arizona, USA), features Alessandro Pacini presenting work entitled "Enabling event-based hierarchical synchronization in SDN ONOS Clusters", in the session dedicated to live demonstrations of innovative solutions. This research proposes a practical solution to the hierarchical approach for programmable communications network controllers and is the result of a collaboration between researchers at the TeCIP Institute and the National Research Council in Pisa.

The award-winning research includes contributions, in addition to that of Alessandro Pacini, from co-authors Davide Scano, a PhD student in the Emerging Digital Technologies program, Andrea Sgambelluri, a researcher at the TeCIP Institute along with Luca Valcarenghi, a professor of Telecommunications at the same institute and coordinator of the EMT PhD course, with the collaboration of Alessio Giorgetti, a researcher at IEIIT-CNR.

The study is the result of activities carried out within the European projects: B5G-OPEN and BRAINE.

On the cover: Alessandro Pacini