Flex5Gware: Flexible and efficient hardware and software platforms for 5G network elements and devices

This paper presents the Flex5Gware project, whose goal is to deliver highly reconfigurable hardware (HW) platforms and HW-agnostic software (SW) platforms for network elements and end devices. By taking into account the need for increased capacity, reduced energy footprint, and scalability and modularity, Flex5Gware will enable 5G HW/SW platforms to meet the requirements imposed by the anticipated exponential growth in mobile data traffic and the large diversity of applications. To put in place this vision, Flex5Gware is designing and prototyping key building blocks to provide a versatile, flexible, reconfigurable, and efficient operation of 5G HW/SW platforms. In particular, the developed technologies will be evaluated and demonstrated with proofs-of-concept by the end of the project.