A 5G Platform for Future Interactive Media Systems

5G promises an increasingly networked society with features that go significantly beyond current 4G offerings. The characteristics of low latency and high throughput, greater adaptability of highly distributed compute, storage and communications infrastructure, and configuration and management of a wide range of network services will transform how future applications are conceptualised, provisioned and utilised. This paradigm shift in network operations and usage will create a tighter integration of infrastructure with services, content and demand in the creative industries and transport, energy and public sectors. 5G will deliver innovative services that improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) for citizens whilst controlling cost for service providers as infrastructure demands increase. Future Interactive Systems are ideal 5G services to validate the acceptance, viability and performance of 5G solutions; as such systems have considerable capacity and performance requirements, the content that is produced and distributed (e.g. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) exhibits challenging variability characteristics that impact resource consumption and drive service and infrastructure adaptation. Personalisation, interaction, mobility and localisation all require responses from services and the infrastructure if QoE is to be delivered and costs controlled. In this paper, we present a 5G service delivery platform FLAME that address the needs of future interactive systems. We outline the requirements for future interactive systems, describe the conceptual design of the FLAME platform and provide insights from deployment in the city of Barcelona.