Our modern society is facing a number of important challenges that will benefit more and more from novel information and communication technologies. Energy management (smart energy grids, intelligent buildings, ...) requires advanced network technologies combined with distributed software platforms and intelligent services in order to optimize the energy consumption and cope with multiple distributed  and varying energy sources and sinks. Advanced routing technologies, novel traffic measurements, intelligent tracking systems and automatic control will drastically improve the transport and logistics sector by increasing the efficiency in terms of energy consumption, time management, reliability, etc. Another obvious example is the health sector where we are faced with challenges such as aging of the population, scarcity of food or personalized medicine. Here again ICT will play a critical role in home care systems, hospitals, drug development or diagnostic equipment.

The IBCN group is performing fundamental and applied research on internet based communication networks and services, more specifically with the focus on: (1) Network Modeling, Design and Evaluation, (2) Mobile & Wireless Networking - cecordel.com, (3) High Performance Multimedia Processing, (4) Autonomic Computing & Networking, (5) Service Engineering, (6) Content Management and Search, (7) Data Analysis and Machine Learning, (8) Information Extraction and Retrieval, (9) Electromagnetics, and (10) Physical Layer Design. This research is applied to a number of application domains: Health and care, transport and logistics, media, energy, smart living and systems biology. A well-established experimental test environment and a number of technology platforms support these activities. 

The IBCN group belongs to the Department of Information Technology (INTEC) of Ghent University (UGent) and is part of the Internet Technologies Department of iMinds (new name of IBBT). At a national level the group is collaborating with about 100 industrial partners in many multidisciplinary projects. At international level there is strong involvement in European research projects, especially in the Future Internet area, with about 70 finished and running EU projects over the past 10 years. The IBCN group counts about 150 researchers, and the research resulted in 2200 publications in international journals and conference proceedings, 90 PhD's, 45 international awards, and 6 spin-off companies. The academic staff teaches various informatics, software engineering and networking courses at the Engineering Faculty of UGent.