NEC, Citrix, Intel, OnApp and Red Hat, along with a number of leading service providers, including British Telecom, and Telefónica are collaborating with academic institutions in Europe and Asia on a project to build future 5G mobile networks based on 'Superfluid' principles.
The Superfluidity Project is part of the European H2020 5G Public-Private Partnership (5G PPP) initiative. It aims to define and develop a converged, cloud-based 5G virtual network and service platform distributed over the mobile edge and core of 5G networks extending up to data centers.
According to NEC, Superfluidity will revolutionize the design of the network architecture by providing high performance network components and services decomposed into elementary and reusable small "software units" which will be embedded into a native, converged cloud-based architecture. It also plans to tackle crucial shortcomings in today's networks and aims at improving today's long provisioning times, with wasteful over-provisioning used to meet variable demand.
