Cooperative platforms through heterogeneous communication networks: Perspective and issues

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are becoming more pervasive and central to boost productivity and improve the competitiveness of all businesses and industries, and ICT innovations underpin progress in all other major science fields. This paper addresses the concept of cooperative platform where distributed resources (i.e., instrumentation and circuits, multimedia archives and applications, desktop) interconnected through heterogeneous communication network are remotely accessed and configured by users having Internet connectivity. Perspectives and the experiences made within projects devoted to this topic, are reported in this paper, with the aim to enlighten related issues and present possible solutions. These solutions could provide great benefits in favour of the Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for what concern the collaborative design and engineering.