In-Flight Entertainment and Connectivity in the 5G Era: the 5G ESSENCE Experimental Platform

Currently, there is relentless activity to conduct trials of 5G technology in realistic situations, targeting use cases that are driven by vertical stakeholders. Aligned with this strand and capitalizing on the recent standardization efforts of 3GPP that recently froze Release 15, we provide overview of an industry grade 5G experimental platform that targets the next generation of In-Flight Entertainment and Connectivity (IFEC) services, when considering the airplane as a self-contained edge environment. The platform is developed as part of the 5G ESSENCE project activities. The contributions of this paper are multiple: describe the IFEC market from a general standpoint, show the hardware and software constituents of the 5G platform and present two virtualized services, namely virtualized video transcoding and caching, which are forecast to play an important role for the future of IFEC on commercial flights.