This paper describes the main activities of one out of three areas of the Telecommunication Group at the New University of Lisbon – the Networking Area. Our area of intervention is the middleware level of distributed systems. Highly populated systems are the object of research. Mobility and wireless systems is the other main area. The focus in this second area is on management of mobility at middleware and application levels. However, in the effort to build an entire architecture we have proposed a new interworking architecture for future wireless systems. The paper begins with our view of the main driving ideas that will be important in the future systems in our area of intervention. The second part of the paper describes our current research and some near future directions.

To appear in: Proceedings of 5^th Conference on Telecommunications (ConfTele'05), Tomar, Portugal, April 6^th-8^th, 2005