Every year a large number of visitors enter the European Union (EU) by cars, buses, trains or ships through land-border crossing points or sea ports bringing significant economic benefits; in particular, 9% of Europe’s GDP comes from tourism. This trend is set to continue, as Europe further considers visa liberalization agreements in a bid to sustain their competitive stance in the global tourism market. This will create major implications on the security and border management in the EU, as well as diminishing the Quality of Experience for passenger travel. Existing directives for controlling border crossing is to conduct checks using biometric data in conjunction with VIS (Visa Information Systems), as specified in the Schengen Border Code. However, current biometric systems rely on one mode of biometric data, that can at times can lead to false identification, in particular under uncontrolled conditions during live sample acquisition. Moreover, the current crop of scanning devices are limited in coverage and typically have fixed links, thus confining the range of border control applications and compromising the comfort of passengers. We aim to go beyond and propose an innovative passenger-centric biometric system that authenticates “on the fly”. We combine the scientific field of wireless security, biometric recognition and data fusion to develop a secure and wireless multimodal biometric scanning device for passenger verification targeting land and sea border control applications. The research approach is the basis for a RISE training action that we refer to as eBORDER, that is foreseen to enhance both the career potential of staff members and innovation capacity at the institutional level. In this context, this action brings together key players from industry and academia with complementary expertise on security, biometrics, data fusion and practical experimentation to train staff by research through intersectorial and international staff exchanges.

SECRET is a collaborative European Training Network (ETN) committed to create an “excellent” educational training platform; that is multi-disciplinary and intersectoral in nature, for Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of wireless communications and networking. In this dynamic field, the challenges are always evolving and more stringent in line with market expectation, and socio-economical requirements. The chapter of 4G (4th Generation) of mobile systems is finally coming to an end, with waves of 4G systems deployed over Europe and worldwide. 4G systems provide a universal platform for broadband mobile services at any time, any place and anywhere. However, mobile traffic is still growing at an unprecedented rate and the need for more sophisticated broadband services is still further pushing the limits on current standards to provide even tighter integration between wireless technologies and higher speeds. The increase in number of mobile devices and traffic, the change in the nature of service and device, along with the pressure on operation and capital costs, and energy efficiency are all continuously putting stringent limits on the requirement of the design of mobile networks. It is widely accepted that incremental enhancements of current networking paradigm will not achieve or come close to meeting the requirements of networking by 2020 . This has led to the need of a new generation of mobile communications: the so-called 5G. The interests of stakeholders and academic researchers are now focused on 5G paradigm. Although 5G systems are not expected to penetrate the market till 2020, the evolution towards 5G is widely accepted to be the convergence of internet services with existing mobile networking standards leading to the commonly used term “mobile internet” over heterogeneous networks (HetNets), with very high connectivity speeds. This proposal aims to narrow the gap between current networking technologies and the foreseen requirements of future 2