The need for massive content delivery is a\udconsolidated trend in mobile communications, and will even\udincrease for next years. Moreover, while 4G maturity and\udevolution is driven by video contents, next generation (5G)\udnetworks will be dominated by heterogeneous data and\udadditional massive diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT). The\udcurrent network architecture is not sufficient to cope with such\udtraffic, which is heterogeneous in terms of latency and QoS\udrequirements, and variable in space and time. This paper\udproposes architectural advances to endow the network with the\udnecessary flexibility helping to adapt to these varying traffic\udneeds by providing content and communication services where\udand when actually needed. Our functional hardware/software\ud(HW/SW) architecture aims at influencing future system\udstandardization and leverage the benefits of some key 5G\udnetworking enablers described in the paper. Preliminary results\uddemonstrate the potential of these key technologies to support the\udevolution toward content-centric and context-aware 5G systems.
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