Superfluidity: a super-fluid, cloud-native, converged edge system
SUPERFLUIDITY offers a converged solution to counter the complexity emerging from three forms of heterogeneity: Heterogeneous data traffic and end-points; Heterogeneity in services and processing needs; Heterogeneity in access technologies and their scale.
The main goal of SUPERFLUIDITY is to run network processing virtualized, on-demand, on third-party infrastructure located throughout the network, and to develop technologies allowing such services to be “superfluid”: Fast instantiation times (in milliseconds), Fast migration (in hundreds of milliseconds), High consolidation (running thousands on a single server), High throughput (10Gb/s and higher). SUPERFLUIDITY tackles these challenges with a multi-pronged comprehensive strategy: i) Flexibility, via an architectural decomposition of network components and network services into elementary, reusable primitives. Ii) Simplicity, via a cloud-based architecture. Iii) Agility, via virtualization of radio and network processing tasks. Iv) Portability and viability, through platform-independent abstractions, permitting reuse of network functions across multiple heterogeneous hardware platforms. v) High performance, via soft ware acceleration, specialization and adaptation to hardware accelerators.
As a result, the 5G superfluid network will benefit from: i) location-independence: network services deployable in heterogeneous networks; ii) time-independence: near instantaneous deployment and migration of services; iii) scale-independence: transparent service scalability; and iv) hardware-independence: development and deployment of services with high performance irrespective of the underlying hardware.
SUPERFLUIDITY officially kicked off the project activities on 1st July 2015 and the first face-to-face meeting was held in Rome on 7th and 8th September. Next Plenary meeting will be held on 30th November – 1st December 2015 in Heidelberg.
SUPERFLUIDITY was funded though Horizon 2020 and the 5G Public-Private Partnership (5G PPP). The project will last 30 months and received a funding of about 7,9 million euro.
Several dissemination activities have been already performed: Presentations about SUPERFLUIDITY were given at EUCNC 2025 – Paris, SDN World Congress – Dusseldorf, OSS in Era of SDN & NFV – London, IETF94 – Yokohama. Next official presentation will be given by Vodafone Chair Prof. Gerhard Fettweis at IEEE 5G Silicon Valley Summit.
Consortium members:
The consortium includes 18 partners from 12 countries:
- a solid base of first-tier, IT industrial partners: CITRIX, REDHAT
- global technology providers: ALCATEL LUCENT (participating with three groups: Cloudband business unit, Bell-Labs France and Bell-Labs Israel), INTEL and NEC
- network operators, bringing to the project their vision and requirements and keen to exploit the project results: BRITISH TELECOM, TELEFONICA R&D, PORTUGAL TELECOM R&D
- SMEs, providing specific and targeted contributions on cloud issues (OnApp), SDN/virtualization issues (TELCARIA), Wireless Fronthaul/Access technology (EBLINK), and playing the role of an exemplary “user”, deploying a streaming/muxing software in our platform (UNIFIED STREAMING)
- research groups with expertise spanning over the spectrum of networking and cloud computing: University Ben Gurion, University of Liège, Dresden University of Technology, University Politehnica of Bucharest, CNIT (coordinator).
Links:
SUPERFLUIDITY website: www. http://superfluidity.eu
Twitter: @Superfluidity5g
LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8416290
For more information please contact:
Prof. Nicola Blefari Melazzi, CNIT – Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni
Email: blefari at uniroma2.it
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