The vision of the SUPERFLUIDITY project, in the framework of 5G, emerges from powerful drivers that are shaping our society.
The first driver is the increase of population and the still growing globalisation and physical and virtual mobility: more people (2 billion and a half in 1950, almost 7.5 billion today, half of them living in cities), and more interconnections among them.
The second driver is the proliferation of new or improved applications and services that need network connectivity: social networks, video (high definition), IoT (metering, smart home, connected cars), industry 4.0 (or the fourth industrial revolution, the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies), low latency services (games, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles), advanced services (face recognition and speech translation, cognitive and expert systems, big data exploitation).
Simply put, we have more connected devices, with each requiring higher data rates, lower latency, and ubiquitous coverage, with very high densities of users possible. This scenario sets out challenging requirements for the evolution of the communication and networking technologies. An important answer to these challenges is to optimise resources utilisation by dynamically allocating them in time and space, and in general resort to virtualisation techniques as much as possible. Benefits of a full virtualisation of network devices, at all layers, include: i) sharing: resources divided into multiple virtual pieces used by different users; ii) isolation: sharing of a resource does not endanger security and privacy of users; iii) aggregation: if resources are not big enough to accomplish a task, they can be aggregated; iv) dynamics: reallocation of resources in space and time on demand; v) ease of management: software-based devices are easier to manage and update. In addition, it is necessary that the network be programmable, as a function of the needs of the services that it provides. The overall vision is thus the one of a software network with an application/service-centric network control able to dynamically share and allocate virtualised resources, allowing to: reduce costs, simplify network management, increase flexibility, ease evolution, and dynamically deploy network services.
