In anwer to the European Commission Mandate 460 on Electronic Signatures Standardization, ETSI has initiated several Specialist Task Forces projects (STF).

The STF428 addressed the needs of Testing activities which should be performed rapidly leading to a quick and easy improvement of the functionality of the existing e-Signature standardization deliverables and bringing them up to date with current practices.

One of the purposes of the STF 428 was to prepare a first interoperability test event on ASiC (Associated Signature Container ETSI TS 102 918) signatures This preparation includes:

• The production of the whole test suite
• The production of all the material documenting how to conduct the interoperability event
• The deployment in the ETSI portal of the suitable PKI and tools required for supporting the        interoperability test event conduction

Following the STF 428, ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability (CTI) organized the first remote Plugtests Interop event for ASiC Signatures from 19 November to 21 December 2012. The event was initially planned to end on 7th December but it has been extended to 21st December following several requests from the participants. The reason was that the amount of testing activities was extremely high within the initial scheduled period, due to high participation in the event as well as the high number of test descriptions agreed.

This Remote event aimed at conducting interoperability test cases on ASiC signatures (Associated Signature Container ETSI TS 102 918). This testing provided full test coverage of this specification.

Several updates to the ETSI specifications have been transformed into Change Request documents which have been presented to the ETSI ESI meeting in March 2013.

Full details are available at: www.etsi.org/plugtests/ASiC/Home.htm

Two important documents guide ETSI's work in the automotive domaine: European Decision 2009 which specifies 5.8 Ghz technology for electronic toll collection, and EC mandate 453 for Intelligent Transport Systems, which specifies 5.9 Ghz technology. Because these frequencies are adjacent, initial research indicated that they could potentially interfere with each other.

The objective of this event was to identify special mitigation techniques that could help avoid harmful interference between toll service DSRC frequencies and those of ITS G5 used for ad-hoc communication in vehicular network.

This event was hosted at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy from 4 to 8 July 2011.

This Plugtests event enabled the validation of the measurement methods and test setups, and a revision of ETSI TR 102 960 was provided. All measurement results are documented in ETSI TR 102 960. As well as this, the test standards series was vallidated and was published as the ETSI TS 102 916 series.

The purpose of this event was to do the preliminary tests for the mitigation method developed in ETSI Specialist Task Force (STF) 397.

It was felt to be very important to carry out and pass these tests, in order to be able to show that the mitigation methods developed in STF 397 are really working for a co-existence between GSM-R in the ER-GSM band and RFID in the 915-921 MHz band.

The European Commission has identified RFID as a technology that can bring fundamental improvements to the Community. Already RFID is being adopted at an increasing rate across a wide range of applications.By 2022 it is estimated that the global annual consumption of tags at UHF will have reached 86 billion.

In order to accommodate the spectrum needs for the increasing number of RFID devices and systems, an extension band has been requested for high power RFID systems in the range between 915 MHz and 921 MHz.

In Europe, part of this new frequency band will be shared between the primary user GSM-R and RFID. In order to guarantee an interference-free coexistence between the two systems, ETSI ERM TG34 has developed mitigation techniques in STF 397 Phases 1 and 2 defined in Technical Specifications TS 102 902 and TS 102 903.

The purpose of the Phase 3 of the STF 397 was to validate that the mitigation techniques specified during former phases perform as intended in a real operating environment. The requirement for these tests is essential in order to demonstrate that ER-GSM and RFID can co-exist in the same band. To carry out these tests, ETSI CTI in support of the STF 397 has organized 2 test events : The preliminary tests in Koelleda (Germany) and the Fnal Tests in Wiesbaden (Germany). The events were held in September and October 2012.

These 2 events gave to the railways a comprehensive trial of the mitigation technique at an operational site in order to allow them to give their formal agreement for RFID to share the band with ER-GSM. A successful outcome to the trial will also assist ECC in recommending the designation of additional spectrum for RFID at UHF. 

The results from the tests are presented in a Technical Report TR 101 602 approved by ETSI ERM TG34 in January 2013.

The Cloud (sometimes referred to as cloud computing) is becoming increasingly important to the success of both small and large European businesses. 

Two very important interfaces are:

• The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) which comprises a set of open community-lead specifications delivered through the Open Grid Forum (OGF). OCCI is a Protocol and API for all kinds of Management tasks. OCCI was originally initiated to create a remote management API for IaaS model based Services, allowing for the development of interoperable tools for common tasks including deployment, autonomic scaling and monitoring. It has since evolved into a flexible API with a strong focus on integration, portability, interoperability and innovation while still offering a high degree of extensibility.
  
  
• The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) from SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) which defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the Cloud.

These events were co-organized by ETSI, OGF and SNIA and hosted by ETSI and IBM. It aimed to test the interoperability of different client and server implementations of OCCI and CDMI specifications. TThese two events were held in September 2012 and in December 2012 and distributed between sites in Sophia Antipolis, FR and Raleigh, NC, US. The events brought together different Cloud standards makers and implementers in the US an in Europe and will go some way towards helping the creation of an interoperable Cloud ecosystem. They also developed guidelines for Cloud standards interoperability and interworking testing.