Enabling 5G with FLAME

Abstract

Mobile broadband communication has pervaded the communication market, responding to the most common and compelling nowadays users’ needs for continued connectivity, fast browsing and audio/video streaming on handheld portable devices. Building on the 4G success through LTE and LTE-Advanced together with recent deployments in large-scale country-wide Operators’ networks, 5G is rapidly becoming a market reality. Various live technology trials worldwide are coming to completion, commercial networks in multiple countries and terminals are being announced to go live well before the “ambitious” target set by industry for year 2020. Consumers’ expectations are the main spin for a fast move towards 5G [ERI-REPORT], due to needs for consistently improved network performance, reduced urban network congestion and wider more performant network coverage for mobile terminals of various kinds (e.g. handheld smartphones, drones, connected cars, robots, IoT sensor and actuators, etc.). The core set of technologies for 5G has fast matured during recent years to provide a new scalable network architecture which can meet exponentially increasing demands on mobile broadband access, both in terms of the number of connected users and advanced network-intensive applications. The Future Media Internet has been evolving along these developments in mobile broadband with key technologies, such as edge computing, orchestration-based service deployment, and programmable infrastructures, being key to its realization. As a project operating at the heart of FMI, FLAME has therefore developed technology innovations that are key to 5G and FMI alike, as being notable in the standards contributions to key 5G forums, such as 3GPP and IETF, by FLAME partners. Furthermore, the urban media deployment propositions developed by FLAME partners, most notably Bristol and Barcelona, clearly align with expected 5G offerings such as Platform-as-a-Service provided by, e.g., smart cities via neutral host models. This whitepaper is exploring the intersections between 5G and FMI from the specific angle of the FLAME contributions to it. For this, we will outline the main 5G drivers that also underlie the work in FLAME, the main contributions of FLAME to 5G developments and the roadmap to 5G impact through our FLAME activities.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Michael Boniface: orcid.org/0000-0002-9281-6095

Catalogue record

Export record