Horizon 2020 and Beyond: On the 5G Operating System for a True Digital Society

The advanced fifth-generation (5G) infrastructure will not only be a sheer evolution of the current network generations but, more significantly, a revolution in the information and communication technology (ICT) field. The 5G technology will efficiently enable new secure, dependable, ultrareliable, and delay-critical services to everyone and everything, such as cognitive objects and cyberphysical systems (CPSs). A fully immersive experience and anything as a service are the primary drivers for a global adoption and market uptake of new technology components, beyond today´s client-server model, where the network has been reduced to a mere pipe of bits. The network will become the nervous system of the true digital society and economy. This article gives fundamental insight into how the 5G mobile communications system is being designed to be powerful and, especially, flexible enough, thus meeting the foreseen and unknown traffic scenarios and services requirements. We also present how a massive adoption and exploitation of mobile-edge computing (MEC), software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and services virtualization will make the 5G operating system (OS) feasible and business viable.