In recent years, 5G is widely used in parallel with IoT networks to enable massive data connectivity and exchange with ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) services. The internet requirements from user's perspective have shifted from simple human to human interactions to different communication paradigms and information-centric networking (ICN). ICN distributes the content among the users based on their trending requests. ICN is responsible not only for the routing and caching but also for naming the network's content. ICN considers several parameters such as cache-hit ratio, content diversity, content redundancy, and stretch to route the content. ICN enables name-based caching of the required content according to the user's request based on the router's interest table. The stretch shows the path covered while retrieving the content from producer to consumer. Reduction in path length also leads to a reduction in end-to-end latency and better data rate availability. ICN routers must have the minimum stretch to obtain a better system efficiency. Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used in networks environment to increase agent efficiency to make decisions. In ICN, RL can aid to increase caching and stretch efficiency. This paper investigates a stretch reduction strategy for ICN routers by formulating the stretch reduction problem as a Markov decision process. The evaluation of the proposed stretch reduction strategy's accuracy is done by employing Q-Learning, an RL technique. The simulation results indicate that by using the optimal parameters for the proposed stretch reduction strategy.
Prior Internet designs encompassed the fixed, mobile and lately the things Internet. In a natural evolution to these, the notion of the Tactile Internet is emerging which allows one to transmit touch and actuation in real-time. With voice and data communications driving the designs of the current Internets, the Tactile Internet will enable haptic communications, which in turn will be a paradigm shift in how skills and labor are digitally delivered globally. Design efforts for both the Tactile Internet and the underlying haptic communications are in its infancy. The aim of this article is thus …
The term Tactile Internet broadly refers to a communication network which is capable of delivering control, touch, and sensing/actuation information in real-time. The Tactile Internet is currently a topic of interest for various standardization bodies. The emerging IEEE P1918.1 standards working group is focusing on defining a framework for the Tactile Internet. The main objective of this article is to present a reference architecture for the Tactile Internet based on the latest developments within the IEEE P1918.1 standard. The article provides an in-depth treatment of various architectural a…
The Tactile Internet (TI) is an emerging technology next to the Internet of Things (IoT). It is a revolution to develop the smart cities, communities and cultures in the future. This technology will allow the real-time interaction between human and machines as well as machine-to-machine with the 1ms challenge to achieve in round trip latency. The term TI is defined by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in August 2014. The TI provides fast, reliable, secure and available internet network that is the requirements of the smart cities in 5G. Tactile internet can develop the part of world …
Tactile Internet (TI) enables the omnipresence and exchange of tactile experiences across the global via the ultra-reliable and ultra-responsive connectivity. This article argues for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) enabled radio access network (RAN) slicing as an efficient solution that satisfies the stringent reliable and responsive connectivity requirements for supporting tactile applications. This article presents the emerging challenges when accommodating CoMP-enabled RAN slicing in the TI ecosystem and expounds the functional split of CoMP-enabled RAN. Besides, this article elaborates on t…
We evolve a methodology and define a metric to evaluate Tactile Internet based Cyber-Physical Systems or Tactile Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS). Towards this goal, we adopt the step response analysis, a well-known control-theoretic method. The adoption includes replacing the human operator (or master) with a controller with known characteristics and analyzing its response to slave side step disturbances. The resulting step response curves demonstrate that the \textit{Quality of Control} (QoC) metric is sensitive to control loop instabilities and serves as a good indicator of cybersickness exper…
The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communication and allow skill set delivery over networks. Some examples of potential applications are tele-surgery, vehicle fleets, augmented reality and industrial process automation. Several papers already cover many of the Tactile Interne…
With the emergence of Cloud-RAN as one of the dominant architectural solutions for next-generation mobile networks, the reliability and latency on the fronthaul (FH) segment become critical performance metrics for applications such as the Tactile Internet. Ensuring FH performance is further complicated by the switch from point-to-point dedicated FH links to packet-based multi-hop FH networks. This change is largely justified by the fact that packet-based fronthauling allows the deployment of FH networks on the existing Ethernet infrastructure. This paper proposes to improve reliability and lat…
From virtual reality and telepresence, to augmented reality, holoportation, and remotely controlled robotics, these future network applications promise an unprecedented development for society, economics and culture by revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work and play. In order to deploy such futuristic applications and to cater to their performance requirements, recent trends stressed the need for the Tactile Internet, an Internet that, according to the International Telecommunication Union, combines ultra low latency with extremely high availability, reliability and security. Unfortunate…
Ultra-low latency is the most important requirement of the Tactile Internet (TI), which is one of the proposed services for the next-generation wireless network (NGWN), e.g., fifth generation (5G) network. In this paper, a new queuing model for the TI is proposed for the cloud radio access network (CRAN) architecture of the NGWN by applying power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA) technology. In this model, we consider both the radio remote head (RRH) and baseband processing unit (BBU) queuing delays for each end-to-end (E2E) connection between a pair of tactile users. In our setu…
In this paper, a new queuing model for the Tactile Internet (TI) is proposed for the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture of the next generation wireless networks, e.g., 5G, assisted via orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology. This model includes both the radio remote head (RRH) and baseband processing unit (BBU) queuing delays and reliability for each end to end (E2E) connection between each pair of tactile users. For this setup, with the aim to minimize the transmit power of users subject to guaranteeing tolerable delay of users, and fronthaul and access …
The next frontier in communications is teleoperation -- manipulation and control of remote environments with feedback. Compared to conventional networked applications, teleoperation poses widely different requirements, ultra-low latency (ULL) is primary. Realizing ULL communication demands significant redesign of conventional networking techniques, and the network infrastructure envisioned for achieving this is termed as Tactile Internet (TI). The design of the network infrastructure and meaningful performance metrics are crucial for seamless TI communication. However, existing performance met…
Tactile Internet often requires (i) the ultra-reliable and ultra-responsive network connection and (ii) the proactive and intelligent actuation at edge devices. A promising approach to address these two requirements is to enable mobile edge devices to share their communication, computation, and caching (3C) resources via device-to-device (D2D) connections. In this paper, we propose a general 3C resource sharing framework, which includes many existing 1C/2C sharing models in the literature as special cases. Comparing with 1C/2C models, the proposed 3C framework can further improve the resource …
Ultra-low latency and high reliability communications are the two defining characteristics of Tactile Internet (TI). Nevertheless, some TI applications would also require high data-rate transfer of audio-visual information to complement the haptic data. Using Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is an attractive choice for high datarate TI applications due to the availability of large bandwidth in the mmWave bands. Moreover, mmWave radio access is also advantageous to attain the airinterface-diversity required for high reliability in TI systems as mmWave signal propagation significantly dif…
Tactile Internet is an emerging concept that focuses on supporting high-fidelity, ultra-responsive, and widely available human-to-machine interactions. To reduce the transmission latency and alleviate Internet congestion, fog computing has been advocated as an important component of the Tactile Internet. In this paper, we focus on energy-efficient design of fog computing networks that support low-latency Tactile Internet applications. We investigate two performance metrics: Service response time of end-users and power usage efficiency of fog nodes. We quantify the fundamental tradeoff between …
The world had witnessed several generations of the Internet. Starting with the Fixed Internet, then the Mobile Internet, scientists now focus on many types of research related to the "Thing" Internet (or Internet of Things). The question is "what is the next Internet generation after the Thing Internet?" This paper envisions about the Tactile Internet which could be the next Internet generation in the near future. The paper will introduce what is the tactile internet, why it could be the next future Internet, as well as the impact and its application in the future society. Furthermore, some ch…
In order to improve future network performance, this paper proposes scalable intelligence-enabled networking (SIEN) with eliminating traffic redundancy for audio-visual-tactile Internet in 5G scenarios such as enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable and low latency communication, and massive machine-type communication. The SIEN consists of an intelligent management plane (ImP), an intelligence-enabled plane (IeP), a control plane and a user plane. For the ImP, the containers with decision execution are constructed by a novel graph algorithm to organize objects such as network elements and re…
Human sensing information such as audio (hearing) and visual (sight) or a combination thereof audiovisual are transferred over communication networks. Yet interacting sense of touch (haptic) and particularly the kinaesthetic (muscular movement) component has much stricter end-to-end latency communication requirements between tactile ends. The statements in this paper, to enable bi-directional haptic control, indeed follow the widely accepted understanding that edge computing is a key driver behind Tactile Internet aiming to bring control and user plane services closer to where they are needed.…
This article first addresses applicability of Euclidean models to the domain of Internet routing. Those models are found (limitedly) applicable. Then a simplistic model of routing is constructed for Euclidean plane densely covered with points-routers. The model guarantees low stretch and logarithmical size of routing tables at any node. The paper concludes with a discussion on applicability of the model to real-world Internet routing.
The next frontier in communications is teleoperation -- manipulation and control of remote environments. Compared to conventional networked applications, teleoperation poses widely different requirements, ultra-low latency (ULL) being the primary one. Teleoperation, along with a host of other applications requiring ULL communication, is termed as Tactile Internet (TI). A significant redesign of conventional networking techniques is necessary to realize TI applications. Further, these advancements can be evaluated only when meaningful performance metrics are available. However, existing TI perf…
The Tactile Internet (TI) is one of the next generation wireless network services with end to end (E2E) delay as low as 1~ms. Since this ultra low E2E delay cannot be met in the current 4G network architecture, it is necessary to investigate this service in the next generation wireless network by considering new technologies such as network function virtualization (NFV). On the other hand, given the importance of E2E delay in the TI service, it is crucial to consider the delay of all parts of the network, including the radio access part and the NFV core part. In this paper, for the first time,…
Tactile Internet (TI) is envisioned to create a paradigm shift from the content-oriented communications to steer/control-based communications by enabling real-time transmission of haptic information (i.e., touch, actuation, motion, vibration, surface texture) over Internet in addition to the conventional audiovisual and data traffics. This emerging TI technology is expected to create numerous opportunities for technology markets in a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperation systems and AR/VR to automotive safety and eHealthcare towards addressing the complex problems of human so…
Robotic telesurgery has a potential to provide extreme and urgent health care services and bring unprecedented opportunities to deliver highly specialized skills globally. It has a significant societal impact and is regarded as one of the appealing use cases of Tactile Internet and 5G applications. However, the performance of robotic telesurgery largely depends on the network performance in terms of latency, jitter and packet loss, especially when telesurgical system is equipped with haptic feedback. This imposes significant challenges to design a reliable and secure but cost-effective communi…
The Thorup-Zwick (TZ) routing scheme is the first generic stretch-3 routing scheme delivering a nearly optimal local memory upper bound. Using both direct analysis and simulation, we calculate the stretch distribution of this routing scheme on random graphs with power-law node degree distributions, $P_k \sim k^{-γ}$. We find that the average stretch is very low and virtually independent of $γ$. In particular, for the Internet interdomain graph, $γ\sim 2.1$, the average stretch is around 1.1, with up to 70% of paths being shortest. As the network grows, the average stretch slowly decreases. The…
Internet of Things (IoT) and Network Softwarization are fast becoming core technologies of information systems and network management for next generation Internet. The deployment and applications of IoT ranges from smart cities to urban computing, and from ubiquitous healthcare to tactile Internet. For this reason the physical infrastructure of heterogeneous network systems has become more complicated, and thus requires efficient and dynamic solutions for management, configuration, and flow scheduling. Network softwarization in the form of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function V…
Touch enabled sensation and actuation is expected to be one of the most promising, straightforward and important uses of the next generation communication networks. In B5G/6G need for low latency, the infrastructure should be reconfigurable and intelligent to be able to work in real time and interoperable with the existing wireless network. It has a drastic impact on the society due to its high precision, accuracy, reliability and efficiency and the ability to connect a user from far away or remote areas. Such a touch-enabled interaction is primarily concerned with the real time transmission o…
Cellular Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as de facto paradigm to improve the communication and computation systems. Cellular IoT connects massive number of physical and virtual objects to the Internet using cellular networks. The latest generation of cellular networks, e.g. fifth-generation (5G), use evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to notably improve the performance of wireless networks. However, given the envisioned new use-cases, e.g., holographic communication, and the ever-increasing deployment of massive smart-physical end-devices in IoT, the volume of network traffic h…
The world is moving toward globalization rapidly. Everybody has easy access to information with the spread of Internet technology. Businesses are growing beyond national borders. Internationalization affects every aspect of life. In this scenario, by dispersing functions and tasks across organizational borders, time and space, global organizations have higher requirements for collaboration. In order to allow decision-makers and knowledge workers, situated at different times and spaces, to work more efficiently, collaborative technologies are needed. In this paper, we give an overview of potent…
The growth of video streaming has stretched the Internet to its limitation. In other words, the Internet was originally devised to connect a limited number of computers so that they can share network resources, so the Internet cannot handle a large amount of traffic at a time, which leads to network congestion. To overcome this, CDNs are built on top of the Internet as an overlay to efficiently store and swiftly disseminate contents to users by placing many servers and data centers around the globe. The topic of CDNs has been extensively studied in the last several decades. However, there is s…
