The advancement of excellence, innovativeness and competitiveness in the crucial sector of Information and Knowledge Technologies lies at the center of the Athena Research and Innovation Center value system. Through national and international R&D projects, technological ecosystem development initiatives, innovative application activities and knowledge transfer to the social and economic environment, Athena RIC fulfills its mission to support the participation of Greece both in the “Europe 2020” strategy and the global movement towards smart and sustainable growth for all. The telecommunications section focuses in particular in the area of broadband networks (strategy, policy, design and deployment of infrastructure and services), network performance evaluation, traffic management, design of large optical networks, and cloud based large data processing, storage and network programming systems (SDN, ODL, NFV).