M A I N A C H I E V E M E N T S : 1. Deﬁnition of the architecture, based on the concept of Reusable Functional Blocks (RFBs). 2. Pro-active monitoring and feedback allowing services to react on demand 3. Lightweight virtualization: fast (milliseconds) boot times, ultra-efﬁcient packet processing in modular software routers 4. Modelling of network functions through semantic description allowing simulations and veriﬁcations for increased security 5. Prototype of a Cloud-RAN that is decomposed into RFBs. It includes front-haul and core 6. Prototype of a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) that is decomposed into RFBs; it runs a video delivery application T W O T E S T B E D S : • Nokia France premises: a hardware and wireless platform allowing to demonstrate innovations (e.g. Cloud RAN, RFB decomposition,...) conducted in the project and made accessible to all partners • BT UK premises: hardware platform consisting of 5 servers and a switch (made accessible to all partners) which allows ﬂexible virtualisation experiments and demonstrations to be run by all partners T W O D E M O N S T R AT I O N S : 1) Rapid deployment/reconﬁguration of a software-deﬁned wireless network (C-RAN), integrated with Mobile Edge Computing, for efﬁcient video delivery from the edge. 2) Demand-driven orchestration for 5G deployment The project has received funding from European Union’s HORIZON 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement n°671566 W H O W H E N W H E R E W H Y W H AT H O W Provisioning network functions and services on-the-ﬂy, running them anywhere in the network, moving them transparently to different locations, and making them portable across multiple hardware platforms. Beneﬁts: - location-independence: network services deployable in heterogeneous networks - time-independence: near instantaneous deployment and migration of services - scale-independence: transparent service scalability - hardware-independence: development and deployment irrespective of the underlying hardware. End results: A cloud-native 5G concept that will enable innovative use cases at the mobile edge, empower new business models, and reduce investments and operational costs. To tackle crucial today’s shortcomings: The increase of world population and proliferation of new or improved applications and services that need network connectivity pose more and more demanding requirements to networks; but revenue growth for telecom operators is expected to halve from now to 2020. Demand cannot be satisﬁed by simply increasing network capacity, especially in networks that are becoming always more diverse, dense, mobile and changing unpredictably. Speciﬁc technical issues: • long provisioning times • wasteful over-positioning used to meet variable demand • reliance on rigid and cost-ineffective hardware devices • complexity, emerging from heterogeneity of trafﬁc and sources, services and needs, and access technologies. • decomposition of network components and services into elementary and reusable primitives • native, converged cloud-based architecture • virtualization of radio and network processing tasks • platform-independent abstractions, permitting reuse of network functions across heterogeneous hardware platforms while catering to the vendors’ need for closed platforms/implementations • high performance software optimizations along with leveraging of hardware accelerators March 2018 S U P E R F L U I D I T Y